Sage

Class Service Design
Duration 3 months
Team Size 3 members

My Role
User Research
Service Modeling
User Testing

What is Sage?

Sage is a service design concept for diabetes prevention. The service promotes incremental behavioral change in the nutritional decisions of high-risk individuals by making healthy eating a low-effort and high-value convenience to their busy lives.

The Prompt

Our prompt was to design a food-related service for improved health. To explore the many arms and legs at the intersection of food and health, we created a concept map of the design space and identified concepts that held good promise for disruption.

The Process

User Research

Our First Focus: The breakfast problem

At first, we wanted to understand why people skip breakfast. Through initial interviews, we found that breakfast skippers have demanding schedules and struggle to justify spending time on breakfast in exchange for vague nutritional benefits that are far in the future. We realized that changing our users' habits for long-term benefit also needed to give them immediate value.

Shifting Focus To Diabetes Prevention

Our findings were generalizable to more than "the breakfast problem". Really, we were at the heart of a much larger matter: motivation for behavioral changes that lead to long-term health improvement. We decided to focus on a more impactful embodiment of this problem: helping those at risk for Type II diabetes get on a nutritional prevention path.

Understanding our Target Users

We interviewed seven potential users with a family history of diabetes. By inquiring broadly about their lives, we learnt that they had demanding schedules, were comfortable with technology, and were conscious about spending. Similar to our breakfast problem, we started to see the pattern of time pressure and an unclear mapping between behavioral change and nutritional benefits.

Extracting Personas and Journeys from Interview Data

Two types of people emerged from our interview data: (1) users for whom diabetes is a far-off concern. They take very little action for prevention. And (2) users who are already experiencing the consequences of unhealthy nutrition and are trying to improve. Representing their struggles through personas and journey maps helped us build empathy and guided our design process.

Persona 1: Alex

Alex, 22

Masters student
Pittsburgh, PA

“I worry about diabetes, but life gets in the way. Even if I did have time, I’m not sure what I need to do to avoid getting it. Maybe I’ll just deal with it when I have more time.”

Alex’s Journey (Click to Enlarge)

Persona 2: Daisy

“I try to “eat healthy”, whatever that means, but progress has been slow. It’s sometimes hard for me to resist unhealthy foods, and I just end up worrying a lot when I do give in.”

Modeling The Problem

Both personas experienced cycles of effortful initiatives and demoralizing relapses. Vague goal-setting was at the core of this. "Eating healthy" felt like an undefined and unattainable goal of nutritional perfection. Due to their chaotic schedules, there was no room for high-effort initiatives.

Four Problem Areas

We used these four breakdowns from our interview data as design guideposts during ideation. Our solutions to these breakdowns are what separates our solution from existing diets that usually fail.

Intention But Inaction

Action But Relapse

Food as Pleasure

Lack of Health Knowledge

Service Design

Sage At A Glance

Sage acquires a reliable understanding of a user's nutritional needs by linking to electronic health records from his/her physician's office.

From this personalized nutrition data, Sage calculates a customized grocery list and also analyzes restaurant meal options. It considers things like sugar intake, allergies, low-fat and low-cholesterol ingredients.

Finally, Sage offers a visualization of progress by pulling data directly from the electronic health records. It charts weight, BMI and blood sugar.

Unlike other diets and nutrition tracking apps, Sage tracks the direct health outcomes, rather than tracking the inputs such as calories consumed.

A Detailed Look at Sage (Click to Enlarge)

As shown in the service blueprint below, Sage will calculate personalized nutritional needs based on data from the user's electronic medical records. Those nutritional needs are an input to a two-part service that meets all the user's eating needs: a grocery delivery service, and a restaurant recommender service.

An Ecosystem of Services (Click to Enlarge)

Sage combines information from an ecosystem of micro services. We identified three major groups within this ecosystem who would invest in Sage:

Health insurance companies. With fewer individuals developing diabetes, health insurance companies will reap the benefits of lower healthcare costs.

Restaurants with a health branding. Restaurants receive the benefits of advertising to a niche user base. Small businesses will particularly be interested in expanding their clientele.

Grocery delivery services. Similar to restaurants, grocery delivery services such as Blue Apron will also benefit from exposure to a niche user base.