Seeking 2027 Opportunities

Hello!

I'm Swetha Joseph,
an interdisciplinary designer

🎓 Recent Grad @ Carnegie Mellon
Graphic designHuman - Computer Interaction

My Plate leverages smart nutrition insights to deliver personalized, data-driven guidance for healthier eating.

Client
Concept
My Role
Product Designer Brand Designer
Timeline
Aug - Dec 2025
Team
Solo Project

Problem Space

Infromation Overload in Nutrition

Many people aspire to eat healthier, yet face a constant flood of fragmented, dense, and contradictory nutrition advice that’s difficult to navigate in modern, busy lives.

Market Research

Finding Gaps in Existing Services

I analyzed leading platforms in the nutrition and meal-planning space to identify gaps in clarity, personalization, and actionable guidance.

Speaking to Users

Interviews with 36 nutrition app users

Affinity Diagramming

Noticing Key Themes

Through research, I synthesized my findings into key problems that limit a user's ability to support effective, sustainable eating habits in real-world contexts.

Defining the MVP

Four features working as one connected system

Instead of asking users to interpret disconnected information, the product brings their food, health, and kitchen context together—then turns it into an actionable next step.

The Outcome

Personalized recipes users can actually follow

Relevant to their health context, preferences, and available ingredients.

How might we help users make everyday food decisions through flexible, personalized, and adaptive support?

Project Goals

Problem

Health goals and grocery management live in separate apps, forcing users to manually connect the dots. This fragmentation adds friction and makes it difficult to build consistent, healthy habits.

Approach

Create a unified experience that reduces cognitive load around food and health decisions. Enable users to move seamlessly from health goals to daily meal choices.

Value

Combine these features into one place: users want a service that connects health goals, fridge inventory, and meal decisions without added friction.

Design System

Reframing Brand Identity in Nutrition

Nutrition brands often rely on clinical language, overwhelming data, or rigid notions of “health,” which can feel impersonal and exclusionary. The branding of this product should be interesting, fun, and modular; using playful visual systems, adaptable components, and flexible identity elements that evolve with user needs.

Final Solution

Meet MyPlate

With nutrition information often overwhelming and hard to act on, My Plate simplifies it into clear, personalized guidance that helps users build healthier diets aligned with their needs and preferences.

01

Make It

The My Fridge feature keeps track of what users have on hand, highlights items nearing expiration, and recommends grocery lists for missing ingredients.

Users can either have the app automatically generate recipes based on their inventory or manually select recipes that align with their preferences and dietary goals.

02

Log It

The My Health feature centralizes users’ health goals and progress, making it easy to track wellness over time.

Meals can be scanned or manually logged and are automatically reflected in health metrics, creating a reliable record users can revisit.

Reflection

Combining My Interests

MyPlate was a really exciting chance for me to bring together two things I care about: graphic design and HCI. I came away from this project realizing just how much the visual side of a product shapes the way we experience it.

It made me appreciate how the small choices—type, color, layout, interactions—all come together to make something feel intuitive, useful, and enjoyable to use.