M5 Master AdyBuddy – Obesity Prevention

As the very first step of our research, we read multiple studies and articles on the topic obesity and its reduction or prevention in adults as well as in children in order to understand the physiological, psychologial and environmental factors influencing the success or failure of attempted weight loss reduction or weight gain prevention. We summarised our research results on a Miro Board where we collected all our future ideas from there. We answered questions about our target group and focus points of our projects.

In the next stage, we conducted a market analysis: there are already a lot of health and weight related applications on the market, what distinguishes them from one another and what do they all have in common? We didn’t want to just become another leaf in a forest of hundred obesity apps which you pick at random and throw away after a few days of trying. Those investigation helped us construct our unique selling point: while most apps focus on the individual, we focus on the power of shared success.

After we had done all the research and collected all the ideas, we started to work intensively on the concept of our application. This process took longer than we expected it to take, but we really wanted to make sure we had a stable base on which to build our app. During these weeks we also talked to sports scientist Sascha Ketelhut and psychologist Janina Krassa to give us additional insights. They provided us with some ideas related to topics such as how to measure individual progress and awareness for nutrition and movement.

After the rough concept was in place, one team created a User Story Map, based on which we planned our MVP and further releases. Another team has been working on the details of the challenges that form the basis of our app and how the individual needs of a user could be measured in order to provide tailored assistance in the change of the users habits. We needed to make sure we designed an application that young children as well as their parents could use to reach their goals as a team or family.

While still in the final stages of the conceptual phase, we started creating the designs. It was important to us to ensure that the app would be appealing especially for our target group - young children - and that the content would be presented in a clear and understandable language.

To achieve this, we iteratively created various design concepts, evaluated them together, and either discarded them altogether or revised them.

We were extremely satisfied with our final design and found that it would provide both children and adults an engaging way to improve their habits a little bit every day.

At the beginning of our implementation phase, we weren’t sure whether to use Flutter or React Native as our front-end technology. Since almost no one had experience with either framework and we had no strong preferences, we had given our decision into the hands of fate and flipped a coin in the end – so it should be Flutter!

We worked agile based on the Scrum method with weekly sprints. In our weekly meeting, everyone reported what they had worked on during the week and what problems they had encountered. Every now and then we also had meetings with our project supervisor in case we had any questions for him. There were certain requests from the team overseeing the project that we followed up on in the implementation. In addition, we made independent decisions and worked independently.

Since each team member was working on their own tickets, we created a Kanban board for this so that everyone could see what the others were working on at any given time. When there were bigger challenges, we also worked on a problem in smaller groups. Our meetings took place both on-site and remotely.