Within the South Asian community, heart disease is an extremely common health concern. Many experience symptoms such as chronic pains and dizziness later on in life, and are at an increased risk of dying from heart attacks and strokes.

Its prevalence can be drawn from the fact that South Asian diets are high in cholesterol, and most live sedentary lives. Preventative measures are the most effective, but because South Asian youth often can't relate to heart disease, many do not take action when it matters most.

SAHRC—The South Asian Health Research Collaborative—is a research group composed of members of Fraser Health. Their goal is to bridge the gaps in existing health research in relation to the unique health issues of the South Asian community within the Metro Vancouver area.

To achieve this, while also aiming to further health research in this demographic, SAHRC has been pushing for heart disease preventative initiatives. Barriers in community involvement, budgetary constraints, and lack of trust and interest from the focus demographic hinder these goals.

Our team conducted primarily ethnographic research to gather information. We also had frequent meetings with SAHRC's research coordinator, which I prepared questions for and facilitated.

I also took notes during these meetings to later draw insights. From my findings, two things became apparent: SAHRC uses the same outreach methods regardless of age group, and due to research constraints, SAHRC's research goals are not feasible at the moment. Because of this, we decided to frame our goal to target community involvement:

Through creating our personas from research notes, we determined that for SAHRC to reach our target audience, there needs to be a solution that connects with post-secondary students in an engaging but non intrusive manner, and consider their dynamic schedules.

We decided that our point of intervention ought to be the moment when our target audience is introduced to SAHRC. By engaging with post-secondary students in a way that is interesting and relevant to them, this would allow SAHRC time to foster engaging dialogue to build interest.

With our research in place, our team then created three guiding principles to help direct our thought process and rationale as we designed our solution: Cultural Relevance, Preventative Measures, and Establishing Groundwork.

With our research and guiding principles established, I used Adobe Illustrator to create a style guide for the team, detailing items such as colour scheme and iconography. I also designed the interface and visuals for the recipes and grocery list screens with Illustrator, and added interactions and animations with Adobe Xd.