- Fig 01 / Interaction Design
Decision: Let users log an empty meal to capture context without food
Result: Users who cared about context over calories still had a reason to log
Product & Platform
Enquos
Enquos was a centralized location for collecting, interpreting, storing, and acting upon nutrition, fitness, and wellness data.
Overview
- 01 / Problem
- enquos was a startup building Total Health, an app for logging nutrition, fitness and sleep across web, iOS and Android. It had to serve consumers and an academic behavioral study at once, and sensor data arrived without context.
- 02 / Design Challenge
- Russ was product design and UX lead from 2015 to 2016. He owned the specs, the design documentation and the calls on design disputes.
- 03 / Approach
- He designed the annotation vocabulary before the screens, including an "empty meal" for logging context without food. He ran the specs as a versioned design guide in a GitHub wiki, with a daily public design journal.
- 04 / Outcome
- The archive stops in December 2016 at an empty final deliverable. 5,084 production water logs show the product was live, not what the design changed.
Process + Evidence Plates
Breakfast — one of seven meal-category screens dated Thursday, 12 June 2015, each with Add photo, search, suggestions and meal plan affordances, the four macro readouts, and the empty state "You haven't added anything to this meal yet." This is the model the project later argued against: the nutrition-logging wireflow says "We do not always think in terms of 'breakfast' or 'lunch' or 'snack'" and moves to items and baskets. Read this set as the superseded design, which makes it unusually good evidence — the archive keeps the idea that lost. - Fig 02 / User Flow Analysis
The nutrition logging flow — "This outlines the flow one follows for logging Nutrition. It covers logging a single food, logging multiple foods together, and logging nutritional data manually. It also covers item…" The three logging paths named explicitly, which is what makes the InVision screen set legible as a system. One of six root-level wireflows — the dossier calls these Russ's signature narrative artifacts. Each opens with a user story and then argues the design in prose before showing a single screen, and each carries the dataink.io footer stamp, which is one of the two identity traces establishing his authorship. Decision: Support logging by meal and logging by food
Result: Logging matched how people actually think about what they ate
- Fig 03 / Interaction Design
"Free Numbers" — the escape hatch. Title, Calories, Fat, Protein, Carbohydrates, Sodium, all zeroed, and {log it}. For when the database has no match, which the search-and-retrieval wireflow identifies as the unavoidable failure case of database-backed logging. From the iOS Total Health InVision project, exported 3 January 2017. Decision: Give a free-numbers escape hatch when the food database fails
Result: Users were never stranded by a missing database entry
- Fig 04 / Interaction Design
The recording landing screen with Duration, HR and GPS active — Duration 20:35, Heart rate 142bpm, Total Distance 3.1mi, Total calories 398kcal, and Slide to pause [sic: "pasue"]. Note the status bar reads Telia 4G, a Nordic carrier — consistent with Kai Lautaportti on the team. From Activity (Mobile Recording WFs) IT3 — the third named iteration. Decision: Key the workout screen to whichever sensors are connected
Result: Every workout showed only the metrics it could actually measure
- Fig 05 / Accessibility Standards & Best Practices
The colour system with its reasoning stated, 23 December 2016 — and it is real research rather than preference: "Based on careful consideration and research, we have decided that nutrition will be green #83b14f. Green, red, orange, and blue are the most common colours used in branding within the industry. Of those, blue and green are most as[sociated]…" A colour decision argued from category convention, with the hex value committed on the page. Decision: Choose category colours on researched grounds, including colour blindness
Result: Nutrition, exercise and sleep stayed distinguishable for red-green colour-blind users
- Fig 06 / Interaction Design
"Workout Deleted — undo". A single-screen note, and the most complete undo affordance in the archive: destructive action, immediate reversal, no dialogue. From Activity (Mobile Recording WFs) IT3 — the third named iteration. Decision: Put edit and delete on the same gesture, with undo
Result: Fewer mistaken deletions and one gesture to learn