Singapore’s Healthy 365 app teardown
Healthy 365 is a health and diet tracking mobile application developed by the Health Promotion Board, a government organisation committed to promoting healthy living in Singapore.
According to the app store description, this app “enables you to track your daily steps count and calculate the corresponding calories burned as you move. It also helps to track your daily food & drinks intake and the corresponding calories consumed.” In addition, users can also accumulate points for steps taken and redeem rewards.
Using the JTBD framework:
As a health-conscious individual, I want to be able to track my daily steps and calorie count so that I can understand and improve my overall fitness.
Below is a quick teardown of onboarding Healthy 365.
I casually spoke to 3 of my friends (yes, there might be inherent bias here) who are current users of the app. I asked the following questions:
- Have you used other fitness tracker apps before using Healthy 365?
100% said no.
Nope, I’ve never felt the need to.
2. What did you use this app for?
I only used it to sync my steps to redeem rewards.
3. How often did you engage with this app? Why?
I only used it 1–2x a week to update my steps and check if I have sufficient points to redeem.
4. How easy or difficult was it to use the app?
Only the initial setup was hard. Syncing my steps and redeeming rewards was sometimes buggy but it loads after a while.
From the very small number of users, I had the inference that the ability to redeem rewards was very strong and quite possibly the only factor motivating them towards app usage. Of course, sonsidering that my sample size was extremely small, there is still much room to investigate further.
From playing around with the app myself, here are my top 3 concerns:
1. Navigation tab bar
The first thing I noticed (besides the alarming green and blue banner on the top which consume so much space) was the navigation bar on the bottom. There are not just four unassuming tabs sitting there innocently. A red arrow on the right indicates there are even more tabs waiting. In actual fact, there are ten tabs on the bottom. Ten?! How would a user know which tab to navigate to at which time? Many tabs can actually be consolidated (eg nest Profile, Rewards, Apps, About under a Settings or Me tab). or they could try a hamburger menu (although many discourage against this too).
2. UI elements
I feel like actual web elements are copied and pasted on this app instead of using beautiful mobile-appropriate elements. As an example, the profile feels too much like a web form where the information is all squished together (for lack of a better phrase). It makes it hard for the user to navigate seamlessly to the respective fields. This makes the app feel clunky.
Another example is the food journal (above). If I just want to add a meal, how do I do that? There isn’t an “Add” option. I had to first use the search bar to find the item before I can even add it. And now, I have two different “Add” options to choose from — “Add to Quick List” and “Add”. What’s the difference? Apparently, it’s not just me who felt the same way.
3. Interaction
It isn’t clear to the user what appropriate actions to take on this app. Let’s use the dashboard screen as an example.
It actually took me a while to figure that I could swipe right and left on the dashboard tab to view different visualizations of my metrics. The first screen shows a summary of my calories burnt and consumed. The next screens showed my steps and calories in a pie form. I’m pretty sure you could just condense this on one screen and instead of swiping, do a scroll version. Clicking on the metrics summary will then show a more detailed breakdown. A good example is mifit (below).
For the sake of a quick teardown, I’ve only skimmed the surface of this app in terms of design because after all:
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs
Functionality-wise, the app works fine but it takes a while for the user to understand how to sync their tracking device, understand their metrics, join challenges, and redeem rewards. In addition, there are many times when I experience app slowness and loading issues.
I still hold hope that there will be iterations and marked improvements to this app and I’m looking forward to that!
Feedback welcome! (:
