Feb 24
UX Case study: National Wellness Institute — Part 1
As the fourth challenge on Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp this was the most challenging project so far!
The squad
This project was done in a 4 student squad and my partners were: Anne Saeger, Carolina Vilela, and Giovanna Conservani, but since we were in a Bootcamp, everybody participated in every step of the project, because we all wanted to learn and cooperate as a group as much as possible.
About the client
The National Wellness Institute (NWI) is an organization founded in 1977. Its mission is to provide “unparalleled resources and services to wellness and wellness promotion professionals to fuel professional and personal growth.” The company has been very successful over the years. And its annual National Wellness Conference has become one of the most acclaimed health and wellness conferences for professionals.
NWI offers certification and training for professional wellness coaches. It also provides them with tools to help their clients achieve their goals. Even though NWI has numerous years of experience in the field, its program has been slow to catch up with technology.
The Challenge
We were required to understand people’s relationship with the six dimensions of well-being to develop a tool that would drive them to action.
The National Wellness Institute wants us to re-imagine how people can adopt and maintain a routine that enhances their well-being. The only requirement is that it tracks the user’s progress and pushes them to commit to a healthier lifestyle.
Surveys and interviews
1. Defining the dimension
After a lot of desk research and group discussion about all dimensions, we decided to work with the physical one, because we noticed that this is a theme that people care about, and also that this dimension has some topics that we could work with — such as food, exercise, meditation, and others— so we decided to create a survey to understand which physically related subjects people were more concerned about, so we can develop a more accurate and useful project.
Physical development encourages learning about diet and nutrition while discouraging the use of tobacco, drugs and excessive alcohol consumption — National Wellness Institute
On our survey we asked people about which topic they were most interested in: food, exercise, meditation, sleep quality, medication control or tobacco, and drugs, and within the subject, they have selected as most important, they needed to choose what was most important to them.
We received 70 answers on our survey and, as a result, we discovered that:
So, after analyzing the results, we decided to work with nutritional monitoring since this was the topic that people demonstrated being more interested in.
2. Food-related survey
With the project theme defined, we made another survey, with the aim of mapping people’s relationships with food and nutritional monitoring. We had 41 participants.
From this second survey we discovered that:
- 88% consider taking care of nutrition really important;
- 68% have or had nutritional counseling;
- 79% reached their goal with nutritional monitoring;
- 58% reported difficulty following the eating plan;
- 37% want to know how many calories they’ve consumed per day;
- 31% want to be able to track their progress on a day-to-day basis.
3. Interviews
We interviewed five people recruited from the second survey that had nutritional counseling at least once, not only to understand more about their relationship with food and diet and what were their biggest difficulties during the process of nutritional monitoring but also to discover some deep pains or needs (jobs to be done).
Our main questions during the interviews were:
- How is your daily diet?
- Have you ever followed an eating plan? How was the experience?
- What were your biggest difficulties during nutritional monitoring?
Through these questions (and a lot of “why’s” asked) we discovered that the interviewed are highly influenced by other people that they live or spend a lot of time together, that nutritional monitoring must be individualized (each body has specific needs), that being able to track progress and setting goals is really important to make people feel motivated and that they seek information about nutrition in a superficial way but they easily adhere to new diets. We could also achieve, from these interviews, two jobs to be done.
Persona
From the surveys and interviews Marcia, our persona, was born.
Marcia is a 35 years old female, bothered by her appearance, unsatisfied with her body, and undisciplined with her diet. She likes to eat and value the quality of her food, but she is easily influenced by others around her, including her food choices. She knows something about diets/ways to lose weight but does not have that much knowledge about them.
She seeks to adapt to the beauty standards imposed by society to feel better about herself.
Her needs are:
- Taking care of her nutrition;
- Have a personalized diet;
- Set and achieve goals;
- Being able to track her progress;
And her frustrations are:
- Feeling unsatisfied with her body due to a social aesthetic standard;
- Having difficulty following a meal plan;
Jobs to be done
Marcia has some deep needs and pains, that are are intrinsic, but very important, such as:
When I feel unmotivated, I try to monitor my progress and set goals so that I can feel that I have overcome myself.
When I am dissatisfied with my body, I look for professional recommendations, friends knowledges and references on the internet so that I can adjust my diet in order to fit into a standard imposed by society.
After understanding the jobs to be done, we thought about how might we help Marcia stick to an eating plan and fit into the patterns to feel better about herself?
Problem and hypothesis statement
Problem
Marcia, who doesn't feel good about her body, needs to be able to follow an eating plan and feel that she is in control of her nutrition because she believes that to feel good about herself, she needs to fit the standards imposed by society.
Hypothesis
We believe that by creating an application that provides easy access to a personalized meal plan, where it is possible to set goals, follow the progress and be close to a nutritionist, we will make it possible for Marcia to be able to follow an eating plan, overcome herself and feel good with her body. We’ll know we’ve been successful if users like Marcia rate the tool as relevant to sticking to a nutritional plan.
This is the first part of this project, and after defining the problem and the hypothesis statement we began to think about the app architecture and started prototyping. You can read about the process of the prototype (and test it!) here.
Thank you for reading until here, hope you’ve enjoyed it! See you in part 2! :)
