Let’s Plan Financial Health!

Recap

It’s been a busy two weeks at the A team’s room. We have jumped off the springboard straight into the deep end of design. The last sprint saw us testing out our three ideas and finalizing on Financial Health Planner as our final idea. We then discussed and ideated on features to help promote long-term engagement and motivate people to go to the doctor. Some of the features we came up with were:

• Monetary rewards for getting tests done
• Bundling appointments with that of your family members to maximize doctor visits
• Friendly competition between family members on who has better progress on getting their tests done for the year
• Planning out the whole schedule for them, helping them maximize on each doctor’s appointment by bundling tests by the same doctor together
• Showing them how other people in the company are doing in terms of getting healthy and going to the doctor’s
• Showing people their risk profile and family health risks

Mid-Fi Prototyping Round 1

We then mixed and matched these features to come up with five major features that we then prototyped into mid-fi feature sketches. We created a male version as well as a female version of our health prototype to test out our product.

Feature 1- Money as a motivator

• long term cost-benefit
• the monetary benefit of getting preventative tests

Feature 2- Friendly competition as a motivator

• nudges to help everyone stay healthy

Feature 3- Spoonfeeding + convenience as a motivator

• test schedule pre-planned
• tests bundled together

Feature 4- Social comparison as a motivator

• Company-wide competition

Feature 5- Health Risk Factor as a motivator

Feature Testing and Synthesis Round 1

We tested this with three people in our target demographic:

• Married
• The early 30s
• With Children
• Has Insurance
• No long term health conditions
• Some family health history

We recruited three users on UserTesting.com to test our features. We wanted to test which feature was the most motivating to users and which was the least. We recorded a walkthrough of the five features so that we could focus feedback on the motivational aspect of the idea, not the UI or usability of the app.

Finally, we synthesized what we learned. We got lukewarm feedback on all our features. The only strong feedback we got was on the family competition motivator where people were concerned about the privacy aspect of seeing each other’s test list and progress. People had different preferences when it came to what motivated them, but they didn’t feel any of the features we had were strong enough to motivate them to go to the doctors.

Motivation Research

We realized that we needed to do more robust motivation research to be able to approach feature design in a scientific manner and be able to justify the motivating aspect of all our features with scientific theory and logic.

Theoretical Research

So we dived into scientific theories of behavioral motivation, habit building, engagement, etc.

Some of the main highlights of our research were:

Self-determination theory states that humans have 3 psychological needs that need to be fulfilled:

Competence

• The experience of meaningful growth
• Efficacy over the behaviors that we’re enacting

Autonomy

• The experience of volitional engagement

Relatedness

• Caring for and being cared for by others

We translated this theory into a conceptual model for our project, intent, and focus area :

Chat with Amy Bucher

We had a chat with Dr. Amy Bucher, VP of Behavior Change Design at Mad*Pow. Luckily for us, Amy also has a background of working in healthcare. We ran her through our features and got her feedback on their motivational aspects. We got a lot of useful feedback from Amy:

• Even just having users write out and identify their needs can help improve motivation (without incorporating them more into the app)
• A lot of people can benefit from tactical support (knowing concretely what to ask or do)
• Normative feedback is another way to establish relatedness
• Look to behavioral economics for additional motivators (for example, loss aversion)
• Financial rewards tend to be counterproductive
• Should consider onboarding questions separately based on whether it is something stable or needs to be regularly updated

Chat with Highmark

Next, we approached our clients at Highmark and sought their feedback on our features and their motivating potential as well. They were able to give us feedback from a more practical perspective being experts in the field

• Some employers have employees fill out a health survey yearly, and this could be a potential source of additional data: ShareCare
• Would recommend tying onboarding to something that happens regularly (and is mandatory) (such as each new insurance cycle)
• Focus on helping them feel successful (intrinsic motivation) rather than offering extrinsic incentives
• Financial rewards could be framed as money saved (i.e. by going to PCP rather than Urgent Care)

Mid-Fi Prototyping Round 2

Now with an arsenal of well-tested scientific theories to back up our features, we dived deep into feature design once again. We went through our features again and added scientific rationale behind every feature, we discarded features which did not have a strong rationale, and we came up with a few new features based on what we read in our research.

Information Architecture and Feature Scoping

We then decided to arrange these features into a cohesive IA flow. Here we realized that while we had a good set of features, for the sake of simplicity and having a more impactful and cohesive final product, we needed to remove a couple of features. We revisited our initial goal and discussed what we were trying to do. We realized we wanted to help people get healthy by getting them to go to the doctor and showing them where they stand with respect to other people their age. Our final feature list looked something like this:

Goal setting process
- Suggested goals based on health information
- Custom goals

List of suggested tests
- Test progress
- Test charges
- Test bundling
- Booking test
- Setting Reminders

Test Details
- What is this test?
- Why is it important?
- Why should you get it done?
- How frequently?
- How much will you pay?
- Financial consequences of not getting it done

List of all tests
- See all possible tests
- Filter for age, sex, smoking and health risks
- Be able to share list with family and friends

Profile page
- Personal goals
- Family health risks
- Insurance Status

Vitals
- History of tests and progress over the years
- Where do I stand in comparison with everyone else

Once we had decided on that, we started building out the Information Architecture of our app.

We then built out the IA in the form of a prototype

Tweaking our Persona

We then decided to tweak the age of our persona to 26–35. We also decided to remove kids as a demographic parameter. We took these steps because:

1. These people would be on their own insurance or on a job that provides one.

2. They have just started #adulting and need more guidance at this point of transition time in their lives. They are not as knowledgeable (psychographic).

3. These people haven’t been bitten by the system, so they are not opposed to an app from insurance.

4. People end up having more health issues as they age, and this categorization targets them while they’re young so they don’t have to face issues when they’re older.

Next Steps

We are planning on conducting usability tests for our prototype using UserTesting.com. We are working to generate a cohesive and exhaustive list of tasks that we want our tester to perform, to enable us to test the usability of every feature that we are adding.