Quick disclaimer, this project is not in cooperation with Astma & Allergiförbundet or anyone else. It is a personal and individual project by me where I explore solutions and improvements to the current service the Swedish Asthma & Allergy Confederation provide today. I will refer to the Confederation as AAF in this project.

In todays society it is all more common to have allergies or prefer not to eat a type of food such as meat, dairy or anything inbetween. Individuals want to know what they are consuming and where its origin is. At the same time it is also hard and almost impossible for individuals who works in lets say restaurants to keep track of all the ingredients in every single dish. Which may lead to unexpected and life threatening situations where allergics accidentally ingest something they are allergic to. Whenever you are traveling this situation might have an even higher risk to happen since misunderstandings can happen between language barriers.

The Swedish Asthma & Allergy Confederation (Astma & Allergiförbundet) can help you translate your allergies when traveling abrod. On their website they can translate your allergies up to 32 (!) different languages and later mail a card with your information and your allergies in your chosen language. There are pros and cons with a physical paper card or a digital version of said card. These pros and cons will be discussed down below where I also will present some improvements and new ways forward. Lets get going!

Down below I will describe our process from researching the topic, defining the problem and finally showing some solutions I came up with.

The problem was not only to design the Matallergikortet based on AAF's official graphic charter but I also realized one other thing while researching and creating this project. That realization was that the user needed a easier and more accessible way to create and use the card. I decided to create a mobile version of the service that is based on AAF's official graphic charter. This makes it more accessible since you are basically always carrying your mobile phone with you. So instead of having a physical card with you, you now have the option to have it in your mobile phone aswell. In case you forget either you now have a back up.

So what did I learn from this project? First of all, this is my first solo project where I just had an idea and tried to make something out of it. To be fair it is quite challenging to start from just an idea and no requirements or anything. It is an entirely different thing from working with a client. "Making up" your own project requires you to think about the little things in a design or service, to then try to redo it in a better way.

Another goal I had with this project was to expand my knowledge and become better at working with prototyping tools. For this project I mainly used AdobeXD and Photoshop for the details in the pictures. I also wanted to try something new with this project and redesigning an already existing service is something brand new to me. The previous projects I worked on has for the majority been new service or a design for a client with an idea.