CASE STUDY
My Plate
ROLE
Product Design
DURATION
4 Months
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam
Overview
MyPlate is the U.S. government's nutrition platform — one of public health's strongest content libraries, and one of its most ignored products. As part of my M.S. HCI research at DePaul, I redesigned it to close that gap.
Challenge
This wasn't a credibility problem — it was a usability one. The app handed users nutrition facts and left them to do the hard part alone: figuring out what to actually do with that information. Users arrived motivated on day one. By day seven, they were gone.
Design Solutions
I ran a heuristic evaluation, benchmarked 5 competitors (MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Cronometer, Lifesum, Noom), and interviewed 5 users while mapping their journey across 4 distinct emotional stages. The real insight: users didn't want more nutrition education — they wanted fewer, faster decisions. I designed a conversational 5-step onboarding and a meal-logging flow built for under 30 seconds, replacing information overload with immediate, actionable choices.
Outcome
The redesign directly targeted the day-seven drop-off — replacing a library people had to interpret with a tool that told them what to do next.
CASE STUDY
My Plate
ROLE
Product Design
DURATION
4 Months
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam
Overview
MyPlate is the U.S. government's nutrition platform — one of public health's strongest content libraries, and one of its most ignored products. As part of my M.S. HCI research at DePaul, I redesigned it to close that gap.
Challenge
This wasn't a credibility problem — it was a usability one. The app handed users nutrition facts and left them to do the hard part alone: figuring out what to actually do with that information. Users arrived motivated on day one. By day seven, they were gone.
Design Solutions
I ran a heuristic evaluation, benchmarked 5 competitors (MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Cronometer, Lifesum, Noom), and interviewed 5 users while mapping their journey across 4 distinct emotional stages. The real insight: users didn't want more nutrition education — they wanted fewer, faster decisions. I designed a conversational 5-step onboarding and a meal-logging flow built for under 30 seconds, replacing information overload with immediate, actionable choices.
Outcome
The redesign directly targeted the day-seven drop-off — replacing a library people had to interpret with a tool that told them what to do next.