Case Study: Wellness Tracking App
GroWELL | Find balance in your life
*This project was developed along with Angela Rodriguez
My Role: UX/UI Design | Project Duration: 5 weeks
Challenge
Despite the vast availability of personal metrics and health apps, people struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
For this challenge, we had to develop a tool that helps people improve their well-being, having as the only requirement that it should track the user’s progress and pushes them to commit to a healthier lifestyle. Also, the UI should reflect a fresh, updated image of that used by the client.
Our client, National Wellness Institute
The National Wellness Institute 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.”
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. They have seen a substantial drop in memberships.
What does wellness mean to people?
To understand that, we ran quantitative and qualitative interviews, and most answers showed that each person sees wellness as a balance between certain areas.
Other insights from the interviews:
Another interesting point was that people believe in the importance of setting goals to achieve an objective. However, almost none of the interviewees track the progress toward its accomplishment.
How might we?
The Problem Statement
“Adult people need to find a way to balance their daily activities, as the lack of it creates a feeling of discomfort in their routine.”
The Hypothesis Statement
“We believe that by creating an application that monitors essential activities for the achievement of individual well-being, we will have an improvement in the index of stress and anxiety levels, among others, thus resulting in a greater number of people’s wellness. We’ll know we’re right when we see a drop in the percentage of people who are stressed, anxious, and have poor sleep quality. We will know this through research and testing.”
Our persona
Chloe is a working mom looking to better balance time dedicated to working, family, and health. She wants a better quality of life and believes balance will make her less stressed and anxious. Lately, she finds herself saving a lot of time for work and family but leaving certain areas such as health (mental and emotional) aside.
Creating a visual style
Our mood board reflects the intent of our product. We worked with soft geometric forms that give a calm sensation, choosing the colors based on those already used by the customer. We just added warmer, earthy tones to them.
The solution
We understand that the organization is fundamental to the wellness balance. That’s why Growell offers to monitor your activities daily, recommending custom tools for improving your well-being. Our interviewees led the way in the creation of our app.
We chose to work with the Wheel of Life (or Life Wheel) as a starting point for the conception. This wheel is powerful because it gives you a visual representation of your real life compared to how you’d ideally like it to be. Professional life coaches frequently use this tool. It helps you consider each area of your life and assess what’s off balance. As such, it allows you to identify areas that need more attention.
NWI uses similar tools on its website, which we thought could be an interesting link between the client and his app, as we kept talking in the same language.
To understand users’ ideal well-being, we are working with a redesigned wheel of life containing the six dimensions of wellness already used by NWI’s website, and they are spiritual, emotional, physical, work, mind, and social.
The user will start by planning his daily activities, each categorized in one of those six previously mentioned. Each period of the day (morning, afternoon, and night) will show the percentage of time dedicated to a particular area according to his daily schedule. In this way, it is easy to see, for example, that in the morning, he saved 16.6% of the time for physical activity, 33.3% for work, and 49.8% for spare time.
After fulfilling the data with daily activity, the app generates a graphic comparing the user’s ideal well-being with what his routine gives him that month. That way, he can identify the gaps and work towards achieving his desired balance.
There are several benefits of goal setting. It helps you stay focused; it helps measure your progress. In the end, you can’t manage what you don’t measure and can’t improve upon something that you don’t properly manage. It helps you determine what you want in life, stay motivated and beat procrastination as you start to understand it as a dangerous thing, a waste of time. Because it’s another day, you aren’t moving closer to that goal.
GroWell helps the user with this issue. When entering a new activity, the user can set it as a goal. Once the end goal is set, the user breaks his desires down into attainable, measurable goals. These goals motivate the user, helping him avoid procrastination and stay laser-focused on achieving his dreams. There’s also a possibility to set a deadline to reach it and see the progress bar moving towards the end as each subtask is complete. The vision board allows inserting photos that visually reaffirm the user’s desires and dreams.
The mood check-in allows the user to track his evolution easily and visually. This daily check-in can give valuable insights into what makes him happy, angry, anxious, and other emotions. It allows the user to build self-awareness, a foundational social-emotional skill that helps us understand how we feel, why, and what we need to be at our best.
Finally, the daily pills give personalized readings according to the inputs entered in the profile. For example, it offers meditation if the user reports that he is stressed. To link the app with the NWI website, increasing the number of visits to the same, we offer reading previews that redirect the reader, if interested, to the main website and, therefore, able to finish reading.
Project Considerations
For developing this project, we ran quantitative interviews (48 interviewees) and qualitative interviews (6 interviewees). We also interviewed two professionals in the mental health domain (a psychologist and a therapist). We interviewed three professional designers to understand the main problems of the client’s image so we could work on them.
Learnings and Next Steps
This project is still in the prototyping phase and needs to improve some of its functions. It would be interesting to run more usability tests to be able to gather more feedback from users.
For the following steps, we would like to develop a pro version allowing the user to categorize each of the goal’s subtasks and have a more detailed and accurate statistics graphic.
