OVERVIEW
Lemon is a speculative platform that blends personalization, community, and AI to make healthy grocery choices more accessible and empowering.
Future Foresight Design Research
User Interface
Prototyping
My Role
Duration
15 weeks
Team
Shrunga, Atmaja
Kyuri, Irene
Lemon is a speculative platform that makes healthy eating easier, more joyful, and more accessible. It works by integrating with existing grocery tools.
I co-designed Lemon as part of a collaborative design futures project. We applied future foresight methods, user research, and behavior-centered design to imagine how personalized grocery guidance could shift from individual willpower to shared, systemic support.
Eating well today isn’t just hard—it’s confusing, expensive, and isolating.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Is meal planning even realistic for busy individuals and families?
Is healthy food only for the privileged?
Why is it so hard to break habitual cravings like reaching for ice cream?
Lemon is a platform that works quietly but powerfully in the background. It learns, connects, recommends, and grows with each family. A grocery-aware ecosystem that meets people where they already are.
OUR RESPONSE - LEMON
UNDERSTANDING THE SHIFTING TERRAIN OF FOOD AND WELLNESS
To shape Lemon, we used speculative design and foresight tools to explore emerging challenges and opportunities in nutrition, grocery tech, and health equity.
We applied several futures methods, including the STEEP model, Future’s Wheel, and S-Curve analysis, to investigate how food systems are evolving.
We also conducted surveys to deepen our understanding of emerging behaviors and perceptions around food and health.
From the research, a new opportunity emerged to create a health-aware grocery system that supports behavior change over time without disrupting existing routines.
REFRAMING THE OPPORTUNITIES
User Objectives
We reframed grocery shopping not as a burden, but as a micro-intervention space, a touchpoint that could:
Learn from household behavior
Integrate joy, community, and flexibility.
Work inside familiar tools (DoorDash, Instacart)
Business Objectives
We positioned grocery shopping as a behavior-shaping moment that aligns user goals with scalable business value.
Expand market share by integrating with major online grocery platforms.
Contribute to public health by partnering with healthcare systems and major companies.
Lemon is the only platform that integrates health, technology, community and AI that leads behavioral changes, and helps people leading a more healthy eating habit.
GOAL
Meet the family
HYPOTHESIS-LED SOLUTIONING
Emma, Freelance writer
Manages household responsibilities while working remotely.
Roger, Architect
Recently diagnosed with coronary
artery disease
Samantha, 7 year old
Bright and energetic, but selective when it comes to food
To help families like Emma’s build sustainable health habits, Lemon uses multiple layers of behavioral design—personalization, social reinforcement, seamless integration, and small rewards.
Emma, Roger, and Samantha each have unique needs. Lemon combines their health data, purchase patterns, and wearable insights to deliver personalized grocery recommendations for every member of the family.
KEY FEATURES
By plugging into apps people already use, Lemon meets users where they are without asking them to change their routines.
Lemon highlights what’s helping and what’s not, while also nudging slightly what could make a difference.
Samantha is a picky eater, and getting her to eat anything green is quite a challenge. The community feature is a game-changer for Emma, she can see what other parents are buying and serving their kids. This makes it easier for her to trust new options and feel supported in her choices.
Flip the cards for a quick peek at what other parents are recommending.
Lemon celebrates life with rewards and discounts on Lemon-recommended products, plus special points during meaningful moments like birthdays.
As Emma makes healthier choices, her Lemon Tree grows, visually tracking her progress.
She also earns Lemon Points, which can be redeemed for incentives across familiar apps like DoorDash.
Lemon is more than an app, it’s a layered ecosystem. The brand story is built around its core values, voice, and tone, elements we saw as crucial in shaping user trust and long-term engagement.
LEMON BRANDING
The Lemon logo is designed to feel fresh, friendly, and human. By blending a playful lemon icon into a clean, modern wordmark, it visually reinforces the brand’s mission to make healthy choices approachable, joyful, and part of everyday life.
Using the Chasm Model, we planned Lemon’s path across user adoption stages.
VISION FOR IMPACT
By identifying users unique motivations and barriers, we tailored Lemon’s design to evolve alongside them, from early adopters to the broader public.
This early prototype tests the idea of a Lemon Smart Cart, a cart that scans products as users place them inside and gives a subtle, real-time cue about each product’s impact on their health.
The system uses a simple color language to nudge behavior in the moment:
• Green = healthy choice
• Yellow = neutral/moderate
• Red = less healthy
Exploring how Lemon could extend beyond online stores, into the aisles themselves.
PROTOTYPING FOR IN-PERSON GROCERY EXPERIENCE
Exploring possible futures gave us a way to shape the one we want to create while helping us understand how to scale a business.
KEY LEARNING AND FUTURE STEPS
Conduct user testing with the prototype to refine interactions and behavior nudges.
Explore business models that balance impact with scale.
Continue evolving the speculative vision toward a deployable product experience.
