Mr. AI Coach
Meal planning and fitness chatbot designed to help users achieve their health and wellness goals.
Introduction
Mr. AI Coach is a personalized meal planning and fitness chatbot designed to help users build their fitness profile through interactive conversations. By asking a variety of questions about the user's fitness goals, dietary preferences, and lifestyle habits, Mr. AI Coach ensures that all the user's needs are met. Users can leverage the chatbot to create customized meal plans by simply asking for meal ideas. Based on the user's input, Mr. AI Coach generates several meal suggestions, from which the user can choose and obtain detailed recipes via provided links.
Challenge
Create an engaging personalized fitness and meal planning application chatbot that will help users to build their fitness profile through interactive conversations.
Mr. AI Coach
Solution
To assist individuals in achieving their health and fitness goals, I designed Mr. AI Coach, an intelligent chatbot that provides personalized fitness and meal planning support. This interactive platform features an intuitive interface where users can receive tailored workout routines, meal suggestions, and motivational guidance, all customized to their unique needs and lifestyle.
Process
The development of Mr. AI Coach followed a user-centered approach, ensuring that the chatbot effectively addressed user needs through an iterative design process. I conducted a user research to identify key points in fitness and meal planning, designed chatbot workflows, and built an interactive prototype.
Research
AI offers data analysis, pattern recognition, and predictive modeling capabilities. By leveraging machine learning techniques, these algorithms can generate personalized recommendations, adapt to user preferences over time, and provide real-time feedback to facilitate behavior change (Kocaballi et al.,2017). Maintaining long-term user engagement and adherence is a key challenge in health management. Personalized nutrition and fitness apps with AI provide tailored content to address this challenge. A similar study done by Garbett et al., showed that participants expressed the need for AI to learn about the user and adapt its dialogue in relation to previous post-workout metrics, such as motivating the user by informing them they had achieved new personal best. AI chatbots use natural language processing for seamless communication. Users can receive real-time personalized feedback, guidance, and support by this. Positive reinforcement and constructive feedback keep users motivated and engaged. Favorable perception of AI feedback builds user trust and system responsiveness (Garbett et al., 2021).
Persona
Based on the insights gathered, I developed a user persona to represent the target audience. This persona served as a key reference throughout the design process, ensuring that user needs, challenges, and goals remained central to every decision.
Sophie
Age: 29
Occupation: Nurse
Marital Status: Married
About: A 29-year-old fitness enthusiast who is always looking for ways to optimize her workouts and nutrition.
Pain Points
• Limited time to research and prepare healthy meals.
• Difficulty maintaining a consistent workout routine.
• Needs quick yet effective fitness guidance.
Needs and Goals
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AI-driven meal suggestions that align with her busylifestyle.
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Short, effective workout plans that fit into her schedule.
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Automated reminders to stay on track.
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Maintain a healthy diet without extensive planning.
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Develop a sustainable fitness habit despite a hectic routine.
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Achieve long-term wellness through structured guidance.
Fitness Planning Flow
Mr. AI Coach is designed to onboard users by asking questions about their fitness level, goals, and preferred workout times. Based on this information, it creates a workout schedule and asks users to set milestones, such as current and target weight. Once onboarding is complete, Mr. AI Coach sends daily notifications, check-ins, and reminders. It also gathers feedback on progress and adjusts workouts as needed, ensuring a personalized and adaptable fitness journey.
Meal Planning Flow
For meal planning, Mr. AI Coach prompts users to answer questions about their dietary restrictions and preferences. Based on the responses, it provides three meal plan options. Users can select a recipe to explore in detail, with Mr. AI Coach providing a link to the recipe page and adding groceries to the list if requested. Users can easily navigate between meal plan suggestions and their profile from the recipe page.
Heuristic Evaluation
A systematic evaluation of Mr. AI Coach identified key usability strengths:
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Visibility of System Status: The chatbot provides clear feedback during interactions, ensuring users are informed about the current state and progress of their requests.
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Match Between System and Real World: Mr. AI Coach uses natural language that is easy to understand, mirroring the way users typically speak about fitness and meal planning.
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User Control and Freedom: Users can easily navigate back and forth in the conversation, correcting any mistakes or changing their input without frustration.
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Consistency and Standards: The chatbot maintains consistent language and interaction patterns throughout, reducing the learning curve for new users.
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Error Prevention: Mr. AI Coach anticipates common user errors by providing suggestions and confirmations before finalizing actions, such as meal plan selections.
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Recognition Rather than Recall: The chatbot minimizes memory load by presenting options and suggestions within the conversation, eliminating the need for users to remember previous interactions.
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Education and Empowerment: The chatbot educated user on relevant topics such as nutrition principles, exercise techniques, and overall wellness.
Usability Testing
Usability testing involved observing real users such as my teammate and some friends as they interact with Mr. AI Coach to identify usability issues and areas for improvement. The following insights were gathered from usability testing session:
● Ease of Use: We found the chatbot easy to use and appreciated the conversational style of interaction, which made it feel like we were speaking with a personal coach.
● Meal Suggestions: Users liked the variety of meal suggestions provided but wanted more personalized options throughout the week and month without interacting with a chatbot.
● Workout Reminders: The notification feature was well-received, with peers indicating that regular reminders might help them stay on track with their fitness goals.
● Error Handling: Some users might experience difficulty when entering incorrect information. Hence, clearer instructions and more forgiving error handling could improve the experience.
● Integration with Other Features: Users enjoyed the integration of the chatbot with other app features, such as workout tracking and progress monitoring, but requested more seamless transitions between different functionalities.
● Educational Content: The educational aspect of Mr. AI Coach was well-received, with users appreciating the tips on nutrition, exercise, and wellness.
Result
I designed an interactive platform for users to receive personalized fitness and meal planning support. Mr. AI Coach offers tailored guidance, helping individuals stay on track with their health goals. Each feature is designed to adapt to users' evolving needs, providing structured yet flexible plans to support their fitness journey.
