Ivy: Food Ingredient Checker
Ivy is a mobile app which allows users to scan food barcodes, dive deep into the processing of the food, and make informed choices about the food they eat.
The current market leader in this space is Yuka. They have amassed over 44 million users and are one of the most popular food related apps in the world. There is a rising trend in eating unprocessed and natural foods and we identified an opportunity to join the trend.Challenge: Drive Daily Use
From our research, it became clear that while ingredient checker apps are a great tool for one to posess on their device, it is not something which users use regularly and often. We wanted to be different and offer feature sets that would encourage daily use. To solve this, we decided to offer a diary and metrics tracking feature. This would encourage users to visit the app every day to log what they are eating, and various metrics such as weight, sleep, anxiety and energy. This data can then be viewed by week/month/year.
Challenge: Drive Conversion
With the app offering a ‘Freemium’ pricing model, it was important for us to drive as much conversion as possible. The research shows that prompting users to sign up for a free trial during the onboarding yields the best return, and if users don’t commit during the onboarding, they likely will never commit. Therefore, we push for commitment during the onboarding.
Once the onboarding is passed, I cast another net to drive conversion by limiting use of certain features within the app. The key is to limit functionality without the app feeling completely useless. I designed an alternative version of the diary screen to accommodate these limitations.
The diary screen features a 5 item/scan limit and when the limit is reached, it is shown with a padlock icon. This padlock item also appears on the health improvement update card which prevents the user from viewing the details of the content. The floating action bar at the bottom persists as long as the user is on the free version. Any action on a locked item or the floating action bar will launch the paywall seen on the right. Research shows that crowns drive the highest conversion of all icons used to denote premium features.