NUFFIELD HEALTH: CONCEPT PROJECT
As part of a three-person team at General Assembly, I created a high-fidelity clickable prototype for a health tracking and appointment booking app.
UX Techniques
User research, user journeys, information architecture, design studio, user flows, wireframes, prototyping, usability testing, high fidelity artwork.Tools
Sharpies, Omnigraffle, Sketch and Invision.
The Brief
The client for this group concept project was Nuffield Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the United Kingdom.
We were asked to create an app that allowed customers to book healthcare services, track their health, and help them to make better lifestyle choices.
The Process
Contextual Inquiry
To get a deeper understanding of the Nuffield brand we visited their gym in Moorgate and gained some important insights:
- The gym had a physiotherapy clinic onsite, reflecting Nuffield’s tightly knit ecosystem.
- Nuffield offers customers free quarterly health checkups (MOTs) to motivate gym goers to keep up with their workouts.
Competitor Analysis
We conducted competitive analysis, comparing features of existing health apps, to learn which features users may expect as standard.
We also logged each app’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of functionality, visual design and app goals.
Key insights:
- Health tracking apps can take many forms and measure a large number of variables
- There was no app that combined health service booking and health tracking in an enjoyable way
This provided us with a unique selling point for our Nuffield app concept.
User Research
To recruit users for interviews, we created a survey to find people who were in our target demographic: 35–45 year olds who use a smartphone.
Affinity Mapping & Insights
After we distilled our user research findings into key quotes, we created an affinity map to group them by theme:
The key insights were:
- Users were motivated by seeing how their health progressed over time
- Users liked automated measurements: they found it a chore to have to keep going into their health app to manually enter data
- Booking a health appointment was seen as frustrating and time consuming. With bookings mainly done over the phone, the line was often engaged, and the health specialists’ availability was often uncertain.
Personas
Using the client brief and user research, we created two personas. We identified the most likely user demographic as middle aged professionals with a family, who have disposable income but are time poor. This broad-ranging demographic would reflect both urban and rural users.
Our primary persona was Geoff Perkins, a 41 year old accountant with two children who needed to take better care of his health. By making healthier life choices, he hoped to live longer, feel better and have more energy to run around after his children.
The Nuffield Health App Requirement
Before looking at the design iterations, here is a reminder of the goals we were set to complete:
Design Iterations
Starting with the booking part of the app, here is how our designs developed from basic sketches to high fidelity screens.
Below are groups of three screens (iterations 1–3), with user feedback included:
The other key part of the brief was to encourage users to make healthier lifestyle choices and track their health progress.
We started with the idea that patients would have their health MOT data presented in a graphical format. Seeing the change from one quarter to the next would help keep them motivated to get, or stay, fit and healthy:
But we soon got feedback that radically changed the direction of our design:
Users would need to be motivated much more frequently to get them to make healthier lifestyle choices.
To help solve this issue we looked to the reviews of existing habit-forming apps, such as Fabulous, to see why people found them effective.
From quotes like these we realised that users wanted the process of being healthy made more entertaining. Also, the users wanted to be congratulated on their progress with in-app rewards.
Our first sketch showed Geoff, our persona, starting a journey that would encourage him to be more active:
In this journey, he would ‘level up’ by completing an activity three times a week and then be given a reward for his hard work. The reward would only be redeemable from a Nuffield Health gym or health service outlet.
Also, at certain points in the health journey, he would be prompted to book Nuffield health services (such as Health MOTs or gym classes) to encourage further use of his health ecosystem.
We took these core ideas and created mid-fidelity screens for user testing and feedback. Here are some of the insights:
Mainly the issues were around how the user navigated through the app, so we made it much clearer by labelling the menu icons and adding pop-ups when any further explanation was necessary:
Here are the high-fidelity screens of our final product:
Click here to see and test the final prototype.
In the prototype, the user can quickly and easily book a health MOT through the app. This removes pain points around booking health services over the phone.
The user may also start a journey towards becoming more active and is rewarded as they make progress. They can also track their health goals and are encouraged to interact with Nuffield Health services along the way.
Next Steps
Here are the features we’d like to focus on next:
- Develop a section for users to learn how to be more mindful with guided meditations and breathing exercises
- Develop a ‘My Health’ screen that gives customers a full overview of their health
- Allows app users to tackle two or more journeys at the same time (eg. being more active and reducing stress)
