Mindless Eating New

An everyday companion that helps you to be more mindful in your work-time snacking by subtly breaking your (mindless) snacking flow.

Project Overview
Roles: UX Generalist
Duration: 4 weeks
Team: 5 grad students
Methods: 1-1 interviews, literature research, iterative sketching, affinity mapping, user journey mapping,
Wizard of Oz usability testing, whiteboarding
Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, paper & pen

Have you ever found yourself munching on some snacks, you were feeling good about your work or the movie, then all of a sudden the bag was empty?
Many of us have… especially during work or watching TV shows.
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Here’s what one of our interviewees said:
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“Snacking at odd hours helps with work, especially gets me in the flow, but its the regret that follows when you have consumed too much”
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We may forget how much we have already eaten, and may end up overeating. This mindless eating behavior may manifest into bigger problems over time such as obesity and heart diseases. [1]

As our research suggests, such a behavior is more common amongst young professionals, who just transitioned from university to work.
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Triggers like stress, habit or boredom made it worse, but one thing that prevailed was that all of them were in a state of (mindless) flow.
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But, there are those who would like to get away from this, and our solution is catered towards them.

Sid has recently moved to Seattle for his new job after his graduation

Due to his sudden shift in his timetable, he does not cook meals and resorts to outside food

During the later hours, he eats munchies from the office vending machine

Our companion uses subtle nudges, based on Hansen and Jespersen’s model [2], to influence user behavior, prompt a reflective choice, or manipulate behavior a tiny bit, definitely avoiding
manipulated choices.

visual

movement

auditory

expression

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The companion stays in the periphery to avoid constant intrusiveness, and to utilize peripheral perception, which can be used to attract more attention, when it is necessary [3, 4].

Here are a few scenarios demonstrating how it works

Breaking the flow by movement

Sid had opened a packet of chips

The digital companion swells up and then slowly pops the top portion

The user then uses his hand to put the top down to end the red subtle blinking

Gesture of "petting"

Sid has been munching for a couple of
minutes endlessly

The companion notices and moves
around the work-desk

The user’s flow in mindless eating slowly breaks and then the companion goes back to its normal position

The ecosystem

Sid uses his ID card to swipe on the vending machine to buy some munchies

He is back at his desk and starts working

The companion gives a subtle notification
in text format

Being a graduate school design project, our companion has not gone into production, but using our prototypes, we had conducted user testing that lead to valuable insights and a strong basis for a future iteration.

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Adding a more personalized feature (eg. something furry) might be desired, but the potential emotional attachment must be analyzed, not to push people into worse mental states.

The nudges were effective in making users aware of their snacking behavior, but it might be irritative or invasive for some.

There is a trade-off between disrupting the desired flow state of work and interrupting that flow for the sake of stopping unhealthy eating, which necessitates further validation.

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References:

[1] Rohit Ashok KHOT*, Deepti Aggarwal, and Nandini Pasumarthy. 2022. Understanding Screen-based Dining Practices through the Lens of Mindful Eating. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29–May 05, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19 pages.

[2] Ana Caraban, Evangelos Karapanos, Daniel Gonçalves, and Pedro Campos. 2019. 23 Ways to Nudge: A Review of Technology-Mediated Nudging in Human-Computer Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 503, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300733

[3]Lindsay Reynolds, Jeremy Birnholtz, Eli Luxenberg, Carl Gutwin, and Maryam Mustafa. 2010. Comparing awareness and distraction between desktop and peripheral-vision displays. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3571–3576.

[4] David B. Ramsay and Joseph A. Paradiso. 2022. Peripheral Light Cues as a Naturalistic Measure of Focus. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX ’22), June 22–24, 2022, Aveiro, JB, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages.

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