Product Case Study: Healthy Week
Healthy Week is a platform to support healthy behaviour change, for people who are just starting out on their health journey, but struggle to maintain new habits.
The system helps users to:
- Set realistic goals
- Focus on a few specific areas of wellbeing
- Find relevant health challenges that improve their behaviours
- Follow through on these behaviours
The design of the application was based on >100 semi-structured interviews with people interested in healthy behaviour change. The key findings of this research included:
- Finding the time was seen as a key barrier to almost everyone who wanted to be healthier e.g. “I want to eat healthily, but I work too many hours to cook”
- Motivation/prioritisation were key, as people struggled to disrupt existing behaviours, but also to maintain new ones e.g. “I’m struggling to fit the gym into my routine”
- Sources of advice/quality of advice varied greatly with “the right thing to do” often skewed by marketing, or personal experience e.g. “My friend says this diet worked for her”
- Consumer habits shape health, particularly within close relationships e.g. if you share a fridge with a partner, how they shop influences how you eat
These insights allowed our science and UX teams to defined a simple structured approach to behaviour change based on B=MAT, a model that emerged from Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. B=MAT emphasises the need for small steps, triggered at the right time, to introduce behaviours. Healthy Week builds on this concept to include a scientifically valid set of healthy behaviours (challenges), that a user can build on.
The application was based on Wordpress, to enable familiar content management for the science team, but was extended to an almost completely bespoke React.js front end, supported by a Laravel API, that was used by the Dept. Work & Pensions, NHS Wales and Superdrug to engage various groups of users in healthy behaviour.
