Lifesum is on a mission to help people live happier and healthier lives through better eating. Accomplishing this mission relies, in part, on creating ways to support users in their daily decision-making pertaining to nutrition.
With this in mind, we’re always looking to leverage technology to create such means of daily support, particularly on mobile. In 2020, we quickly identified the opportunity to leverage Apple’s new iOS 14 widget capabilities to provide useful, at-a-glance updates to help users keep up with their daily habits.
Apple’s widgets are meant to elevate key content from apps and display it where people can see it at-a-glance on iPhone, iPad and Mac. They’re also meant to help Apple users personalize their home screens for efficiency and aesthetics. With this in mind, our approach was built upon three pillars:
Supporting Our Users
Again, our mission is to help users achieve long-term health by making good nutrition decisions on a daily basis. So we began by determining what information would be most informative and motivating, yet glanceable given we could only display a small amount of information. Though we provide a wealth of information for users in our app, we knew our widgets had to only display the most essential data to keep users informed of their progress throughout the day. We then reviewed user data and feedback to narrow down the options. Our goal was to focus on a single idea that would be the most useful and focused.
Great UX
As with our app we wanted to ensure our widget provided a great user experience. Apple allows widgets of three different sizes: small, medium or large. We decided to offer different widgets in all three sizes to offer maximum personalization and utility.
This meant creating three different dynamic displays within very small views. We had to ensure the information updated to provide an accurate view and that when tapped, opened to the corresponding location within our app. Furthermore, each widget size was designed to provide additional information and functionality than the size before it.
Simple and Beautiful Design
We wanted to ensure that when users glanced at our widget on their home screen, they knew it was Lifesum without our logo being present. The aesthetic aspect is important since widgets occupy very precious space on users’ home screens. We combined aesthetics and functionality to create an interface that looks beautiful and, at the same time, helps users easily distinguish the different pieces of information at-a-glance. We carried over our design tenants of clarity and brevity, along with color. Our team ensured images would look great at all three scale factors, a challenge for any designer given widgets are available on iPhone, iPads and Macs.
While our brand often uses colorful imagery, we wanted to ensure the color didn’t overpower the data shown. We also wanted to support dark mode to again allow users maximum personalization.
As a result of our team’s hard work, Lifesum was the first digital health app to create and launch a health widget for iOS 14. We offer three, beautifully designed widgets, each with different views of users’ daily progress.
Small: Shows calories consumed and remaining and macros consumed and remaining. When tapped, this widget opens to the daily progress page in our app.
Medium: Shows calories consumed and remaining; water consumed and remaining; macros consumed and remaining. When tapped, this widget opens to the daily progress page in our app.
Large: Shows calories consumed and remaining; water consumed and remaining; macros consumed and remaining; tacked foods per meal along with an emoji review of each meal tracked. When the top portion is tapped, the widget opens to the daily progress page in our app. When the bottom portion is tapped, you are taken to the corresponding meal page to track.
When Apple hosted their annual WWDC event, our widget was featured on stage as a prime example of the reimagined widget. As of today, more than 30,000 users regularly use our widgets to track their daily progress.
