This is the first concept that I share on this website. Sometimes I've got great Ideas for apps, buildings, principles, etc. That's where my Concepts come in.

This concept is a combination of Pokémon, Duolingo, and Locket.

The first Idea grew a few months ago, but as you can imagine, small ideas become big.

When I first thought about this app, My first idea was to make a pokemon-like app where you can collect all sorts of basic ingredients when you eat those foods.

The goal is not to collect every ingredient in the whole app, but to collect as many as you'd like. The app should encourage its users to eat variated and try new things out every now and then.

The way that users should collect these ingredients, is by scanning their plate. An AI scans the photo, and decides what the user is eating. If the AI is wrong, the user can change the outcome manually. The AI only exists to make the job easier for the user. Some users could also start noticing how repetitive their meals are.

Any app that only does this would get really boring after a few days. That's where the Locket part comes in. The app also has a friend section. When a user scans their plate, their friends will be able to see the photo in a gallery/feed-style section. The user can also pin a widget to their phone homescreen, and the widget will display the last photo that's been scanned by anyone among their friends. Friends can react to the photo using emoji's or short sentences. Friends can also see all of the ingredients that the scan contains.

This also defeats the purpose of cheating. The app should not contain a worldwide or national leaderboard of people with the most ingredients collected. Users can only compare their own collection with that of their friends.

The app also contains weekly challenges to compete with the user's friends. These contain of a few different challenges, for example: users may be prompted to be the one that scanned the most plates in a week, or to be the one that scanned the most uncollected ingredients. This makes trying new food a game.

The app also can, if users want to (they should be able to turn this off), contain a streak of continuous days the user scanned their plate, without too much interruption. Think about the streak freeze used in Duolingo.

The Toggle-Philosophy

Psychology is a big part of design. This app also makes use of it. People don't want everything an app offers. There is not an one-size-fits-all option. That's why I designed this concept to contain a lot of toggles. If users don't like streaks or don't want the app to contain a friend system for themselves, they should be able to easily turn features on and off. When a feature is turned off, the feature should not even show anywhere other than the toggles section in the app settings. That makes the stress that comes from streaks, or the social pressure from friends, completely optional.

Privacy and comfort

User profiles will never be publicly displayed in the app if nobody explicitly searches for them. They should be able to create an account under a nickname, and they don't have to use their own IRL name. Friends can easily remember them as who they are IRL.

The app also does not show nor track how many calories your meal contains. This is a fun/social app, not a health tracker.

The Demo

I've already built part of the scanning process as proof of concept of the app. I will probably extend it, depending on my free time.