A Retrospective of inKilter
From User Research to Prototyping
Health can mean different things to different people and it always depends on something. However, one thing that everyone can agree on is that health is an important factor in our lives- it is a resource for everyday life. With that in mind, how do we, as busy bees of the 21st century keep our health as our top priority and most importantly, in kilter with all the work and social noise surrounding us?
For my first UXDI project, I was assigned the playground of health tracker. It gave me the opportunity to dig deep and explore how people define and shape their health.
Going into the project, I knew I wanted to understand more of how people manage their heavy work schedules with their social and personal lifestyles. I had a lot of ‘how’ questions in mind: ‘How do they keep everything in balance?’ and “How do they keep track of their health?”
I wanted to understand some of the applications available out there to get a feel of what features users utilize on their journey to being healthy. I explored and experimented with Apple’s Health app, as well as the more popular apps such as MyFitnessPal, Workout Plan, Pacer, Nikes’s Running, Digifit to understand its usability and features. Of course, these apps didn’t tell me if they actually help their users in living a healthy life.
User Research
In order to tackle my question about people tracking their health, I had to target users who have busy schedules with barely any “me” time to themselves.
My interviewees had varying daily schedules that involved work, school, social outings, and routines. So I initiated my interview with more general questions such as “how do you define health?”, to get a general gist of how important their health is to them. I then streamlined my questions to focus on how they plan and track their fitness and eating habits.
The general questions I asked allowed me to understand the context and motivations of the user’s journey to being healthy. The more bottlenecked questions regarding eating habits, time of the day dedicated to exercise, frequency of exercise, goals to achieve, restrictions, and struggles — allowed me to understand their behaviors, pleasures, and pains.
How do you define health? “When your body is functioning at its optimal condition. This means eating well, working out, etc”
“Health to me is the state of optimal physical and mental well-being”
“Being in good enough shape to do anything you want to do”
“Health is how a person manages to deal with everyday stresses of life (physical and mental). A person doesn’t have to be disease-free as long as their chronic condition (diabetes, hypertension, etc) is controlled and is not affecting their usual daily activities”
Analysis of User Research and Synthesizing
From the data collected during the interviews, I was able to narrow down the common themes of pains/struggles and pleasures via an affinity map. I wrote down key insights from each interviewee on designated colored post-it notes for easy identification.By categorizing and synthesizing the insights gained from my interviewees, it helped me pinpoint what the underlying problem people had with keeping their busy schedules and their health in kilter.
The Problem to Solve
From the affinity map, users had problems with:
- Finding time to working out
- Inconsistent schedules
- Finding cheap health food
- Controlling urges of eating poorly
Therefore, the problem to solve is: Difficulty managing workout time and incorporating healthy food options
Designing a Solution
The solution to the problem is keeping balance, or should I say “in kilter”. inKilter is an app that will allow users to schedule their workouts and their healthy meal regimen.
inKilter will have easy, convenient, and time-efficient features:
- simple yet quick navigation
- easy fitness and meal input
- history of past workouts and meals to keep track of
Initial Design and Usability Testing
With the main problem in mind, I proceeded to sketch out the initial design of inKilter in hopes of mapping out the navigation and incorporate the important features that will assist the user in maintaining their work-health balance. I gave the initial design to one of the interviewees to test out the usability of the app and received helpful feedback.
“high-maintenance; nav-bar is confusing”
“calendar is confusing. Redundant features that seems complicated”
“the headings don’t make sense”
Design Iterations
Iteration One:
With the feedback from the user testing, I did a lot of simplifying and removing of features that enhanced flow, eliminated clutter, improved white space, and clarified headings.
I took the improvements to a different user and received additional feedback that allowed further simplification of the navigation. The user stressed how time-consuming it is to type in certain fields and the scrolling of the day’s diary is not efficient. I took the input back to the drawing-board to make the revisions.
Iteration Two:
The revised inKilter app was taken to what I call a global user- someone who I did not interview. This is to see if a regular person would understand the flow and the overall app. In general, he was able to comprehend the flow and navigation.
The features seems to “make sense and it’s straight-forward”
The only thing the user brought to my attention was the labeling of History because he did not expect to see a calendar when it is clicked on. Okay, simple fix. “History” to “Calendar”
Final Prototype
The final touches to the prototype made the application more refined compared to the initial sketches earlier on in the design process.
Link to the prototype: https://popapp.in/projects/576cc57ab373ce272686ac35/preview
Future Notes to Consider
Overall, this project was a rewarding experience. I learned a lot from interviewing different people- everyone is different. It was especially nice to receive feedback and apply it to develop a better product. I enjoyed identifying the problem and coming up with a possible solution to address it. I was most surprised when I took my initial design to a user to test. I thought that I had designed an optimal design on the first shot. The design iterations definitely made me understand that it takes time and many iterations to come to a final product. I’m not saying that I did achieve a final product because there’s definitely a lot of improvements that can still be done- it terms of other features such as push notifications.
I did struggle with asking the “right” questions during the interview to target the main problem. Also, synthesizing the insights- categorizing the data requires time and perspective. For next time, I hope to better formulate my ideas and questions for the interview. In addition, if time allowed it, I would like to iterate through my design a few more times to see how far I can go with the solution.
In the greater scheme of things, I’m excited for what’s more to learn in the upcoming projects!
