Wellness App Design Report
Being a newcomer in a new city and not having a single contact or much money to fit in is something that I have always wondered about how people in this situation do it and is what I would like to explore and discovered in my first wellness app workshop.
I have always wondered how difficult it should be to reach a city being a completely unknown, although I have lived in several cities I was always lucky to arrived and have a friend of friends, a contact, etc. Even how difficult it must be when you arrive and your economic situation is terrible and you don’t have even ways to manage it. Not long time ago, I was at a friend’s house and he showed me a video of how Thailand uses its native food to show a national image abroad and in this way they try to gain reputation and influence in foreign societies which is called by the term of gastrodiplomacia
Not only the video on gastrodiplomacy, which term being totally oblivious and unknown to me, caught my attention and especially a section of a man’s project in Pennsylvania that helps newly arrived refugee families in the city to integrate them through share a meal at his home. Immediately it cause something in me and in a way it was answered some of my previously questions that would lead me to explore new results.
And that’s how I started my research, asking people if they would like to share a meal with a stranger and at the same time being helping them, if they attend charity events where the reason for the meeting is food. Although the results were interesting I was not getting my user because it was very specific and my survey had been released to people in general. Which forced me to open my concept to be able to know even more about my audience, asking how they relate with others, if they are interested in meeting new people or if they looking for people with the same principles to be able to build a friendship.
I started to get results like; people are interested in meeting new people, they prefer to meet in person and not through social networks, they must share their same principles and when they meet someone new they expect to obtain a friendship beyond the act of benevolence that they are carrying out. All this outcomes drive me address my problem statement.
“People who do charity need to meet people with the principles because they expect a new friendship beyond the act of charity.” Was my problem statement solved and I started looking for new solutions to it through an affinity diagram which It led me to four important points to work in:
- The act of charity (motivation)
- My values and principles
- Meet people (need)
- New friendship (goal)

Having already made clear the instances that my users had to go through, I began to think about the way user’s had to take to reach their goal. After several failed attempts I reached what would be the flow of my app.

At the time of making my prototype, I thought that my users needed to be able to define their personals and events attributes which they were looking for according to their needs. For this I thought that the filters would be a great help for them to achieve their task. I also defined the type of contribution in two groups after being researching in different social aid websites.
Once located in the event, the users will have the option of contacting and communicating with other participants in order to organice matters of the event or keep in touch for future solidarity events.

During the testing, which the task was to set your preferences and the event and contact another participant, different questions appear such as:
- Volunteer and donor buttons are not understood as buttons. Therefore I had to give them more real button look.
- The users needed a text to place it within the section where they were.
- Navigation buttons to return or close the page.
- Within the list of event participants add a message icon that invited users to contact other peers, because once they were at this instance they were lost.
Once the improvements have been made, and the prototype has been tested and at least working I jumped to my low fidelity prototype in sketch, which my design intention was to have a clean design and spacious appearance to avoid the information overwhelm my user at the time of get they task. I just testing it twice and although the flow worked there were still needs such as:
- Where can I save my events or share them?
- How can I go back to home?
- Maybe I need more text in the messages section to guide the user to understand the section content.
- Where can I see my attended events?
Although these last needs were updated in my prototype they were not tested but I think that with some more testing of my prototype and making the required improvements it will be able to meet the user’s tasks.

My learning from this workshop were how important research is to know distinctive elements of our user and how their characteristics can guide you when you are organising the navigation flow.
On the other hand I learned from testing how simple details such as clear icons or buttons, positioning text and well organised information guide the user to complete a specific task.
And what I would not do again is to think of a function without considering external connections.
