Joan Nandawula

For this project, we were tasked with developing an interactive system to address transportation and mobility challenges in Los Angeles. Our solution focuses on creating a product that enhances the tourist experience in Venice Beach by combining safe navigation, community engagement, and cultural immersion into a seamless and gamified journey.

How might we influence tourists to find their way through Venice Beach safely while connecting with the culture of the boardwalk?

Our research revealed that navigating the Venice Beach area can be quite challenging for tourists. This issue is further compounded by the high volume of pedestrian foot traffic and the complexity of multi-modal transportation in the area. These insights highlight the need for a solution that simplifies navigation, improves wayfinding, and enhances the overall visitor experience in this densely populated and vibrant tourist hub.

Our solution focuses on creating a product that enhances the tourist experience in Venice Beach by combining safe navigation, community engagement, and cultural immersion into a seamless and gamified journey. The project emphasizes end-to-end design and leverages research-driven insights to serve and delight users sustainably.

"GUT MOTHER is a mobile grocery companion app that helps people make informed food choices for better gut health. By scanning grocery items, users receive simple, research-informed explanations about how foods support the gut microbiome through three approachable categories: Gut Fuel, Intestinal Protectors, and Diversity Boosters. The app also highlights culturally familiar foods and local food pop-up events, making gut health education more accessible, practical, and inclusive. The project emerged from a growing concern that many people experience symptoms such as IBS, bloating, bad breath, fatigue, and prolonged recovery from food poisoning without understanding how food choices influence their gut microbiome. While interest in gut health continues to grow, many young adults are encouraged to solve these issues through supplements before understanding the role of food. At the same time, nutrition information remains buried in scientific jargon, conflicting wellness advice, and expensive marketing claims. GUT MOTHER translates complex gut-health science into clear, actionable food literacy at the point of purchase, helping users build healthier relationships with food by prioritizing understanding over supplements. "

"Many people want to improve their gut health, but knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Between supplement marketing, conflicting wellness advice, social media trends, and scientific terminology, nutrition information is often difficult to understand and even harder to apply in everyday life. While researching the topic, I noticed that grocery stores dedicated entire aisles to probiotics, powders, and wellness products, yet provided very little guidance about the foods that naturally support gut health. The challenge was not a lack of motivation. Through observations, interviews, and testing, I discovered that many people genuinely wanted to make healthier choices but lacked the knowledge and confidence to understand what different foods actually do. Existing solutions often focused on calorie tracking, microbiome testing, or supplement recommendations rather than helping people develop food literacy. My challenge was to translate complex gut-health science into a format that felt approachable, trustworthy, and actionable at the moment people make food decisions. I needed to balance scientific accuracy with simplicity, reduce information overload, and create a system that could help users understand gut-supporting foods without requiring prior nutritional knowledge. The result was a design challenge centered on education, accessibility, and helping people navigate gut health through food rather than confusion. "

"The development of Gut Mother combined field research, competitive analysis, prototyping, testing, and iterative design. I began by observing grocery store environments and examining how gut-health information is currently presented to consumers. During these observations, I noticed that supplement aisles often provided stronger educational messaging than food sections, prompting me to question why nutritional guidance seemed easier to access through products than through food itself. I then conducted secondary research using scientific literature, expert interviews, documentaries, nutrition resources, and existing gut-health platforms. A competitive analysis revealed that many solutions focused on calorie tracking, microbiome testing, or supplement recommendations rather than helping people understand food. This became a key opportunity area. Through journey mapping, user scenarios, and storyboards, I explored how people currently navigate food decisions and where confusion occurs. Early sketches and wireframes focused on translating complex nutritional concepts into approachable educational experiences. Multiple rounds of low- and mid-fidelity prototyping allowed me to test information hierarchy, navigation, terminology, and visual design. User testing produced several important insights. Participants consistently wanted practical guidance over health metrics, clearer explanations of scientific concepts, more food imagery, and greater transparency around sources. These findings led to the creation of three food identities: Gut Fuel, Intestinal Protector, and Diversity Booster. Which simplified complex microbiome concepts into memorable categories. The final design combines research-backed education, grocery-store decision support, and source transparency to help users better understand how food supports gut health. "

"Gut Mother is a mobile grocery companion designed to improve gut-health literacy through food rather than supplements. The final solution helps users make informed food choices by translating complex microbiome science into simple, actionable guidance at the point of purchase. The core of the experience is built around three food identities: Gut Fuel, Intestinal Protector, and Diversity Booster. Instead of requiring users to understand scientific terms such as prebiotics, probiotics, or polyphenols, the app organizes foods into approachable categories that explain how they support the gut ecosystem. Users can search for foods directly or scan grocery items to instantly learn what category they belong to, why they are beneficial, and how they contribute to gut health. To build trust and transparency, the Learn experience integrates Perplexity to retrieve information from trusted sources such as NIH, Harvard Health, Stanford Medicine, and PubMed. Gut Mother then translates this research into clear, food-first explanations while displaying the original sources. Additional features include personalized food tracking through My Gut, educational content, culturally familiar food examples, and community food resources. Together, these features transform gut-health education into a practical grocery shopping experience that encourages curiosity, diversity, and confidence rather than restriction. "