NutriGuide
NutriGuide is a mobile app that makes food shopping safer for people with allergies and dietary restrictions — scan a product, know instantly if it's safe. Designed solo as my university dissertation, it was my first end-to-end UX/UI project and where my research-first approach began.
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Challenge
Food shopping can be stressful and even dangerous for people with allergies, dietary restrictions, and visual impairments — ingredient labels are small, cluttered, and written in scientific language that's hard to interpret quickly under pressure. To understand the problem properly, I ran 10 user interviews with people managing severe allergies, coeliac disease, and visual impairments, alongside a survey of 150+ respondents.
The findings were clear: users needed speed above everything else, followed by plain-language clarity and personalised safety alerts. These three priorities — scan fast, understand instantly, trust the result — shaped every design decision that followed.
Approach
With research insights in hand, I mapped user flows around a single priority: getting from scan to safe/unsafe result in as few steps as possible. The information architecture followed a clear hierarchy — onboarding, scan, instant result, ingredient detail, suggested alternatives — designed around three distinct personas: parents managing allergies who needed a direct scan-to-result pathway, low-vision users who needed reduced clutter and logical focus order for assistive technologies, and health-conscious users who needed quick access to editable preferences without interrupting their shopping flow. I tested the core flows iteratively using low and mid-fidelity prototypes, asking users to think aloud while completing real tasks.
Testing revealed a need for stronger visual hierarchy on result screens, simpler ingredient language, and clearer messaging that results were personalised to their preferences — all of which were refined before moving to final design. Accessibility validation confirmed the scan-first approach successfully reduced time to decision and improved user confidence across all three user groups.
Looking back, NutriGuide taught me more about design than any module or textbook could. Sitting with someone who has a severe allergy and watching them navigate a supermarket — the anxiety, the label-squinting, the second-guessing — made it impossible to treat this as just a university project. It had to actually work. That experience of designing for people who genuinely need the solution to be right is something I've carried into every project since. It's why I always start with research, and why I never call something done until I've watched a real person use it.
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