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Assignment 2: application critique on 'snap and eat'

This is an application critique on ‘Snap and Eat’. ‘Snap and Eat’ is an app for a one-time event which encourages people to buy healthy food and win prizes. After the event ended, the app remained not updated and had a lot of issues. I will pick three important points from the presentation for summary.

Firstly, the app has extremely bad UI and UX. The first page the user sees is a whole page of terms and conditions which is quite striking and overwhelming for such an app which is about healthy lifestyle. Then after that the app will ask for permission for location access, where it is not very clear why this app need to know your location. In addition, the interface design such as the size and color of headers are not pretty and sometimes confusing. Also, the swipe motion in the bottom bar is not needed as some of the sections is not as significant and can be taken out, also it is not intuitive for the user to swipe the bottom bar.

Secondly, the functionality of the app can be simplified. There are many features and functions that are not working well or not very meaningful. For example, the app tries to recognize what food it is after the user taking a photo of the food, but sometimes it can’t recognize the food correctly due to the limited photo resource in database and the nature of diversity of food. In addition, there are background description of food or the brand company displayed before the nutrition information, and usually the user does not care much about the background information of food. As for the food diary, a lot of other apps have this feature and they are more well-designed. Therefore, this app should focus more on the purpose of it which is for the one-time event: snap, eat and win campaign, so it could remove all the redundant features which confuse the user and highlight the main feature of the app.

Thirdly, this app has commercial potential although it did not mean to make money. On one hand, since it encourages people to eat healthy food, it can collaborate with food company such as subway to put advertisement in the app. On the other hand, since it promotes a healthy lifestyle, it can collaborate with gyms or other fitness related app to put advertisement to make profit as well.

Therefore, from the presenter’s point of view, this app has quite a bit of issues probably due to the mismatch of client and developer’s vision and intention. The main serve purpose of the app is not clear and the features are messy too, so there might be some miscommunication or lack of user study.

As for what I think about this app, I totally agree with the presenters that the app is not well-developed in terms of design and functionality. In addition, I believe that this app has more potential. I think instead of starting from building an app for a one-time event and casually adding in some additional feature which was not well-developed and not updated afterwards, we could build an app with all the features well developed and make that one-time event just a side event in the app, and of course we can have more events after that. For example, the app can be a health diary which allow users to note down the food they eat and be able to see the nutrition information. This feature can be better built if we have a larger database of pictures of food and the option of food searching by text when the picture cannot be recognized. Then the snap, eat and win campaign can just be an event in the event bar of the app, where the user can participate by click into the event. Therefore, even the event ended, users still have reason to use this app. In addition, by having an event section, we can actually organize more events and campaigns to keep the user involved, while making profits by collaborate with government or companies by putting up their events on the app.

In conclusion, ‘Snap and Eat’ is an app which aimed for a one-time event but at the same time has other features which were not well-development, resulting in confusion and bad user experience. However, the app can be carried out in a way that it can involve user in a long-term base and make profit out of it. 

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 9, 2017 at 12:08 AM

    Yes, the main problem of this app is that it shouldn't be named as 'Snap & Eat'. The app should be exclusively 'HPB App' that conducts all the campaigns and promotions HPB organize, so that people do no have to install 10 apps to participate in 10 different events. The most tragic part of this is that it is not the developer's fault. The developer tried his/her best trying to make tha app functional and still meet most of the requirements to participate EAT&SNAP&WIN challenge. It is probably the managers vision that caused so much trouble, and the developer just had no choice but to answer to the boss. As a software developer, it could be our futures as well, like really.

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  2. UnknownSeptember 9, 2017 at 10:52 AM

    Hey Baichuan,

    I agree that the app should either concentrate on being a health diary, or Snap & Eat. By trying to do both, the app compromises on the user experience. This is important because annoying users with too many buttons will eventually cause them to abandon the app. I'm a believer of doing one thing right, instead of focusing on too many things.

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