Deep Dive into App’s Core Functionalities (12noon-1pm)
Understanding the Needs
- Spend 30 minutes outlining the app’s purpose, target audience, and key functionalities.
- Consider what makes your app stand out in the fitness and meal planning market.
Feature List
- In the next 30 minutes, detail the core features, such as macro tracking, exercise logging, meal suggestions, and progress tracking.
Purpose:
The motivation to build this app came from frustration. MFP’s model is to flood you with ads for every single action that you perform. A decade ago when I was seriously calorie counting it used to be a much better app. Now it feels like an ad malware infested the app. I’ve downloaded and tried a few other apps and each had their best features and short comings. One app even had a barcode scanner that returned nothing ever!
The purpose of this app is an app by me, for me, to make macro & calorie counting less tedious, on my way to a leaner body.
A gentle reminder for supplement timing, a record of the workout weights I am on an
Target Audience
The easy question: in theory this app isn’t build for anyone but myself. Presumably if its easy enough to use, friends and family might benefit from using it. Part of the motivation of building this app in public – is to put a timebound, accountability held attempt at having fun, learning some modern tech platforms.
Officially: Anyone who is frustrated at the quality/cost of current MacroCounting & Fitness apps in the marketplace today and just wants an easier way to do things.
It’s rare to get an undistracted block of time when you are a parent so I very much appreciate that its now or never.
Key Functionality
- Macro counting – by Proteins, Carbs, Fat by Gram
- Macro counting against the custom target – allow choice of model (this means the PCF amount changes as the body weight changes)
- Fitness – Basal Metabolic Rate models – this allows us to calculate the calorie deficit, I currently use Mifflin-St Jeor equation (Determine if i want to incorporate muiltiple models)
- Fitness – Weekly reminder to measure Weight and dimensions of Chest, Waist and Hips
- Mental Wellness: Include a celebration for NSV (non scale victories)
- Macro Counting: Quick way of dropping standard set of meals into the counter
- Stretch: OCR to scan nutritional text labels and store in database
- Stretch: A way to help #7 from the average serving size to the actual size and input into the day
- Fitness: get 30 minutes of active movement a day – determine if its possible to tap into Apple Health/Fitness for this (LumiHealth does this so I am going to assume yes)
- Nice visuals
- Backlog: Visual for achievements / Nice Graphs tracking progress
- Backlog: Food planning: what meals to cook when? Include recipe store so I waste less time rewatching videos on instagram?
Feature List
- In the next 30 minutes, detail the core features, such as macro tracking, exercise logging, meal suggestions, and progress tracking.
Core Feature – Macro Tracking
- Allow Macro Math Calorie counting (1g of protein = 4 calories etc)
- For processed foods allow estimates from nutri labels
- The end goal would be a hybrid of accurate calories from whole foods and published labels on processed foods
- Allow export to excel? In the course of my day work, I model in Excel a lot, it would surely be easier to manage
- Any import functionality required?
Food Library / Nutritional Library
- For the easily available bought from my local grocery stores or online from iherb/amazon is there an easy source of nutritional information required?
- Make my own dish: if my greek yoghurt is always consumed with some walnuts/almonds with raisins what is the actual calories?
- Make it easy to switch walnut/almonds out or raisins etc. Essentially this is like a calories by the topping
- For my meals at work, I almost always order from the make your own salad bowl place, is it possible for me to estimate the calorie content of the bowls I am making?
How does it look?
- Standard 4 radials of overall calories/proteins/fat/carbs?
- Allow categories for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Snack/Sin
- I should be able to scroll through the dates easily to see what I’ve done the previous days
- I should be able to rollup to a weekly/monthly/yearly view if there’s data.
- Trending of macro nutrients
- Easy weekly reminder (at time of convenience set by user) to measure the weekly weight and 3 measurements.
Comment: Meal planning is backlogged – focus on getting core feature up.