Easier Decision-Making: Designing Low Cognitive Load Interfaces to Support Dietary Health Among Fatigued International Students

Sammanfattning

When international students face compounding stressors — academic pressure, cultural adaptation, and limited daylight in Northern Europe — they often experience cognitive fatigue that makes even routine dietary decisions difficult. Existing dietary apps exacerbate this by demanding manual logging, multi-step navigation, and dense menus, while ignoring cross-cultural use contexts. This thesis investigates how low-cognitive-load interface design can support dietary health among fatigued international students. Following a Research through Design approach, twelve semi-structured interviews informed the development of a high-fidelity prototype grounded in Cognitive Load Theory, the Fogg Behavior Model, Hick's Law, and Nudge Theory. The prototype was evaluated through eight Think Aloud sessions and NASA-TLX assessments. Interviews revealed that cognitive fatigue drives students toward dietary shortcuts, and that cross-cultural ingredient unfamiliarity adds a significant identification and planning burden. User testing showed low overall perceived workload, with positive responses to reduced choice sets, pantry-based suggestions, and non-judgmental feedback. The cross-cultural ingredient feature was well-received, though its entry point remained underutilized. The study contributes design knowledge for fatigue-aware dietary tools in cross-cultural contexts and demonstrates how cognitive offloading strategies can be operationalized in mobile dietary support.