Case Study: Health & wellness tech — Atomic design for atomic habits — Research

Designing an mHealth app tracking the user’s activity and progress

Source: Unsplash

The healthcare industry has seen a massive wave of investment, innovation and new entrants from the technology, telecom and consumer industries. In 2021 alone, $44 billion was raised globally in health innovation — twice as much as 2020 — and the acquisition of health and health tech companies rose 50%.

There are also signs of disruption within the industry itself. Up to 80% of providers in the US are planning to invest in technologies including digital health, artificial intelligence (AI) as well as tools to support clinical staff and caregivers over the next five years. The smartphone’s omnipresence has created a massive market for mobile health & wellness apps, wearables, and biometric trackers.

10 years of global health Innovation Funding. Source: StartUp Health Insights — 2021 year end report

The client & brief
The Daily Health Conference is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting health and wellness through impactful public talks, participatory workshops, and professional training all over the world.

The brief? Design the mobile version of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which will be part of their membership offering.

• All of their members will be able to use it.
• The app can address any aspect of personal well-being, including (but not limited to): medicine, fitness, nutrition, meditation, time management, and so on.
• The app should monitor the users’ progress and encourage them to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
• Users must retain control over their personal data (GDPR Compliance).

How do you keep a healthy lifestyle?
We created a survey in order to gather quantitative data related to healthy lifestyles and routines. Out of the 110 participants:

• 70% declared to keep a healthy lifestyle by exercising, 32% by practicing mindfulness.
• When being asked what’s their favourite exercise, 55% of the participants picked running or walking.

Secondary research further supported that two big trends were emerging on the mHealth market: running and mindfulness apps.

Mind and body
We focused our research on those two activity trends as they both don’t require any equipment, are free and perhaps the most intrinsic to humankind. On the one hand, mindfulness reduces stress, improves sleep, helps with addictions, decreases blood pressure. On the other, running improves cardiovascular health and builds muscular strength, on top of improving the mood and having the potential of being a social activity. These activities are among the most accessible — step-by-step programmes such as couch to 5k are open to any beginners, starting with… a simple walk.

“Despite the challenging conditions on the track, almost every runner said they felt a kind of euphoria at some point, which they referred to as ‘pure running.’ It shows the power of getting more in-tune with ourselves by occasionally shutting out the distractions.”- Dr. Jo Corbett, collaborator in the Asics blackout study

What has caught our attention is what happens when mindfulness is combined with running.

• A 2020 study published in Neural Plasticity found that mindfulness training can even give your endurance performance a boost.
• Combining directed meditation with running or walking reduced symptoms of depression by 40 percent for depressed participants.

Called Mindful running, this double discipline helps with both mental and physical wellbeing. Through users’ interviews, we understood that the main motivations behind exercising were to release stress and let go “of the negative energies”. The main pain points, especially for beginners were that they struggled to keep regularity in their training and to establish a sustainable routine that motivated them.

Devices
When it comes to motivation, the devices used while exercising played a big role.

• 52% of our survey participants stated to exercise while listening to music.

A practice that has some pros and cons, music indeed reduces your perception of effort during a strenuous workout which can make you want to go the extra mile. On the flip side, it can also throw off your pace during a race as you can’t hear your breathing.

• 12% of our participants exercise while listening to podcasts.

This was corroborated during our user interviews, where users explained that the learning aspect plus the physical activity made them feel even “more productive”.

• For the users we interviewed, they can’t even think of having a physical activity like running without having a tracker.

“It’s nice to have something on your wrist to keep count. I only got into health apps thanks to the smartwatch — it’s a constant reminder.” — Myriam

“I can hardly see myself running without a tracker. I use it to track my runs, speed, elevation and distance.” — Emile

Again, according to subject matter experts (SME), this is coming with some downsides. “Users can become fixated on the numbers and kind of preoccupied with tracking and hitting certain numbers and in doing so lose track of what really matters.” — Alissa Rumsey, coach and dietitian.

How to build a healthy routine?
Routine is a powerful tool to reinforce habits. The more regularly you do something, the more likely you’ll stick with that behaviour over time. The habit loop is a framework for thinking about the formation — and destruction — of habits. The cue or reminder is the trigger that kicks off the habitual behaviour. The reward on the other side, reinforces routines and helps keep habits in place. Say you wanted to break a bat habit: chances are that you’d have to recognise first your habit loop to succeed and form new productive routines that still offer rewards.

Source: The habit loop from Atomic Habits by James Clear

Rewards and gamification
So as UX/UI designers how might we help our users to stick to a new healthy habit? By implementing gamification in their journey. Here are some ways to do it:

• Showing the progression of the user (learnings or improvements).
• Giving Feedback. Actions call reactions. This is being translated on interfaces by micro-interactions.
• Offer rewards — Does it remind you of something?

From atomic habits to atomic design
Habits can be atomic. They are small decisions and actions that you make in your daily life without even thinking about them. Habits are considered atomic because they compound, meaning that the benefits of good habits (and the destructiveness of bad habits) start small, but over time, the effects of your habits grow exponentially.

1% everyday better curve — Source: Atomic Habits by James Clear

This is not only science but philosophy. You can apply this concept in many fields and to your everyday life — even in design.

Our style tile: our components, the atoms, the molecules which will form the organisms of our app.

Atomic principles in Design provide us with a structure for not only formulating our design, but also creating the building blocks of our design systems, pattern libraries, and ultimately, our high-fidelity prototype.

Solution & next steps
Using the insights research has generated we ideated following Design Thinking principles and prioritised features thanks to the MOSCOW Method.

Our MVP is a mindful running audio guide, we wanted it:

• To improve enjoyment, performance, connection between mind and body.
• Being accessible to a wider number.
• To solve pain points related to an “all-or-nothing” approach tracker and offer the suggested approach becomes “good-better-best”.
• Help users to adopt healthy routines and keep them in the long run with the help of gamification.
• To be GRPD

Coming soon: the second part of this case study will focus on the several prototypes of the MVP, usability, accessibility testing as well as glass-morphism UI.

Thanks to Ingrid Hage and Yousr Haddar, my teammates for this one-week project in the context of Ironhack’s intensive Bootcamp in Paris.

MARGAUX BIANCHERI on Behance