Case study: how might we help people adopt and commit to a health-improving routine?

Challenge: designing a wellness App from scratch

Timeline: 11 days

Role: UX/UI Designer

Team: 2 (Dilek Bircanoglu & myself)

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Trello, Drive

Photo credit Unsplash

The brief

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

The Daily Health Conference offers an online membership on their website, but the program has been slow to catch up with technology, and as a result, they have seen a substantial drop in memberships.

Now the Daily Health Conference wants to find a way to offer more value to its members. To do this, they have decided to focus on two things:

1. Create a set of digital mobile apps for their members
2. Update their image — create a design system that reflects an innovative approach to wellness

The Daily Health Conference wants designers to rethink how people can adopt and commit to a health-improving routine. The requirements are:

• The app can address any aspect of personal well-being, including (but not limited to): medicine, fitness, nutrition, meditation, time management, …
• The app should monitors the users’ progress and encourages them to adopt a healthier lifestyle
• Users must retain control over their personal data (GDPR Compliance)
• The user interface should reflect a new, fresh, updated image aligned with the Daily Health Conference values

Because this is an MVP for a competition, the app should not attempt to solve all of the wellness issues that people are experiencing. Each design should focus on one important aspect of wellness.

Step 1— The context

The consumer health and wellness is a 1,5$ trillion market growing at 5 to 10 percent each year. But it’s quite crowded and the competition is fierce.

As we started to dig deep in the wellness industry and the emerging trends, it was important for us to be in accordance with the topic we’ll choose. So we questionned ourself, looking at our wellness habits. And one topic emerge : food supplements. Both, we take supplements on a daily basis, for different purposes, and we know people that doing it too or thinking about it.

To confirm the relevancy of this topic, we conducted secondary research about supplements consomption. Here are our main findings :

1. Supplements are booming and the market is projected to grow from 72$ billion to 129$ billion between 2021–2028
2. One of the reasons for this interest’s growth could be found during Covid-19 pandemic. For example, in UK we could observe a 19% increase in supplements consumption and in US, in 2021, 80% of people declare taking supplements.
3. We observed a growing trend and an appeal for personalized food supplements cures with a lot of different players and many articles and studies around this particular topic

The supplements market — Overview

Along side, we also conducted a competitor analysis on worldwide players. After analyzing many of them, we could observe that they fell into 2 categories :

• educational only— applications/website that only offers educational content on supplements
• sale of a personalized supplements cure — based on your answers to a detailed questionnaire, the site offers you your own personalized supplements cure, to meet your needs

In the second category, most of the companies offer a web experience only and no tracking feature to follow your intake and your global wellbeing during your cure.

Market positioning

After our industry and competitors analysis, as we now have certainties we still have some assumptions that we need to clarify during our next research phase :

• People like to be guided
• Taking supplements is a long process and people have difficulty to stick to a routine
• Supplements taker are looking online to find out what kind of supplements they need, but they struggle to find relevant informations for them.

Step 2— Understanding the user

The next step of our research was to understand the user’s motivations and needs.

We conduct our user research using: a survey for quantitative data and interviews for qualitative insights.

As we want to understand who are supplements users, our survey’s screening question was only to exit people who have never taken supplements and are not interest in. The main goals with our 15 questions survey was to know:

• How do they started ? Which supplements are they taking ?
• What do they want to improve ?
• If they know which kind and dosage of supplements their body needs ?
• When they use a wellness app : do they usually track their progress in it ?
• And finally their age and gender

On 100 responses, here are our quantitative insights:

Based on 100 survey responses

Based on 100 survey responses

Among our respondents: 65% are women and 79% are between 25/40 yo.

Following the survey, we conducted 5 user interviews with supplements takers only. Below are some of their main quotes:

Based on 5 user interviews

We gather all our findings into an Empathy Map to help us have a global understanding of our user goals, needs, actions, thoughts and feels.

We were now able to have a clear vision of the target user for our upcoming solution, this fictional character that we call the persona.
So meet Eva Dubois, the wellbeing enthusiast:

Our persona, Eva Dubois, the wellbeing enthusiast

All our user’s findings and insights lead us to the definition of the specific problem we’ll try to solve with our solution, this “problem statement” will guide us during our entire design process:

Supplements takers who do not visit professionals frequently need a way to find the right kind and dose of supplements they need to improve their wellbeing because they feel fatigue and less energetic.

Step 3— Defining our solution

With our problem statement in mind, the ideate phase begins. A brainstorm that aims to clearly expose every possible ideas and to cluster similar ones so we can have a first picture of what could be our solution.

Tree main topics emerge :

• User reassurance: advices and content should be from medical professionals, user needs to see them and be able to chat with them quickly in-app
• Personalized content: user needs to have relevant informations for his particular needs & goals
• Tracking part: user needs to have support and be able to track his global wellbeing during his cure to keep being motivated during the long process

Now, we need to be sure that our ideas bring value to the user. For this, we completed a Value Proposition Canvas.

The goal here is to validate that our solution solves a the user’s problem by understanding the pains, the gains and the tasks our user needs to do, and on the other hand, expose what our solution offers to him so he can complete the tasks, relieve his pains and achieve his gains.

Value Proposition Canvas — user main pain points

Value Proposition Canvas — solution’s offer

As we are developing an MVP, a viable product with limited resources, we need to select and prioritize what we want to include in the App, according to what’ll bring the most value to the user.

To help us, we used the MOSCOW Method and categorized the features into 4 categories :

1. Must have’s : help our user achieve his goals — these are the mandatory features which are the core of the product
2. Should have : not crucial to fulfilling our user’s needs
3. Could have : nice to have but no need and maybe not a plus for our user
4. Won’t have : don’t add value to our solution

MOSCOW Method for our MVP

Thanks to all our research so far, we can now introduce you to our App: Healthy/me. An App focus on helping people finding the right supplements they need to take in order to improve their health and wellbeing, thanks to:

• Personalized recommendations based on an online diagnosis tailored by medical experts
• Quick access to professionals
• In-app progress tracking
• Educational supplement’s content

Here is the User Flow of a new user and details of what you’ll find on the App:

• Once you have downloaded Healthy/me, you’ll land on the “Homepage”
• You click on “Do my diagnosis” and answer the questionnaire
• You now have “Your recommendations”
• On this page, you can click on “Set your reminder” so you’ll create an account and set up a reminder for your daily intake to keep you motivated and track your progress in-app
• Once you have started your cure, you’ll be able to follow your progress in your “Dashboard” (How to fill your dashboard ? Every day, you’ll receive a notification to remind you to take your supplements. After click “OK”, the App will ask you how do you feel, according to your goal)
• You can also view supplements’ informations in the “Supplements” section or chat with a professional in “Contact”
• You can also have access to your profile where you can see your current cure, your past(s) cure(s), some help and update or delete your account

Step 4— Designing & testing Healthy/me

After a quick drawing of a low-fi to organize our mind, we jump to a first version of the mid-fidelity prototype.

Before going to the hi-fi phase, we decided to conduct 5 usability testing of our prototype to validate the clarity of the user’s flow and see how users interacted with the solution.

Our main insights were:

• what’s clear: the user’s flow and the main goals of the app — there was no friction/hesitation during our testings and our users said that this is the experience they are expecting to have with this type of product
• what’s missing: information on the calendar in the dashboard section (it’s not clear for user what is the purpose of it), an option to create an account on the “Your recommendations” stage
• what’s need improvement: wording on “Contact” and “Supplements” section

Those feedbacks were implemented in our last mid-fi version:

Final mid-fi prototype of Healthy/me

In the meantime we worked on the Visual Identity of Healthy/me. What we want for our application is a professional, clear, elegant, energic and fresh ambiance.
We created a moodboard to set up the atmosphere around our brand attributes:

Healthy/me moodboard

And we started to nourish our Style Guide as we designed the hi-fi:

Healthy/me Style Guide 1/2

Healthy/me Style Guide 2/2

Here are some screens of the high fidelity Healthy/me prototype :

Healthy/me preview

You can see the full application in video below or check it directly on Figma here:

Healthy/me hi-fi prototype

Redesigning my portfolio projects: why & how

To catch the emotional response from users to Healthy/me, we ran 5 Desirability Tests. The goal was to understand the user’s perception of our design and see if it’s aligned with what we want them to feel.
We used the Microsoft Reaction Cards method and made a list of 20 adjectives (a mix of positives and negatives), then we recruited 5 people, showed them the design and asked them to select the 5 words that best describe the product for them and explain their choices.

Below is the result of our test where we can see that reliable, elegant, fresh and clear (3 of 4 are our initial brand attributes) were the most mentioned by our testers:

Desirability Testing on 5 users

Wrap up

Our goal was to rethink how people can adopt and commit to a health-improving routine by creating an innovative App that focuses on one important aspect of wellness so we can help The Daily Health Conference modernize their image.

Currently, people want to take care of their health. This is a part of “better consumption” to live longer & healthier.

But our world is moving fast and people are busy working or spending their free time rest & entertain themself.

They need a little push to help them improve their health without dedicate too much time to it.

Our users are part of this category. They take supplements because they want to improve their wellbeing when they mostly feel fatigue and less energetic but they don’t visit professionals frequently for this purpose.
So, how might we help them improve their wellbeing without risks for their health?

Our solution: Healthy/me. An App that helps supplements takers finding the right supplements they need to take in order to improve their health and wellbeing, thanks to:

• Personalized recommendations based on an online diagnosis tailored by medical experts
• Quick access to professionals
• In-app progress tracking
• Educational supplement’s content

What’s next?

• Optimize the dashboard
  Conduct usability & user interviews to understand what could really help users achieve their goals and how do they want the infos to be display in this section
• Keep track of the retention
  As we want to keep our users motivated, we need to be sure that our notifications/content are efficient/sufficient enough so they use the App to track their wellbeing and are interested by starting new cure once they completed one

Thanks for reading!
You can find my work on my portfolio and if you want to say “hello”, let’s connect on Linkedin :)

Want to see the redesign of this project?
Check out my article about “why and how” I decided to redesign this project for my portfolio:

Redesigning my portfolio projects: why & how