Flow: a Wellness Case Study
PROMPT
The health and wellness industry has been experiencing immense disruption due to advancements in technology. Today’s consumers are embracing wearable technologies and other activity-tracking products more than ever before.
The National Wellness Institute is looking to explore how they can leverage technology to help people live a healthier life. they define this as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.
The Client
The National Wellness Institute (NWI) was founded in 1977. They promote health and wellness coaches with resources. They focus on the six dimensions of health and wellness. The company has been very successful over the years and are a trusted source for all things wellness-related.
The Problem
Although the NWI has had great success, they have been slow to catch up with technology. As a result, there has been a substantial drop in memberships. The NWI needs to find an innovative way to add value to their members, and they have decided to do this by creating a set of digital wellness tools for wellness coaches — but NWI realizes this is easier said than done.
Despite the abundance of personal metrics and health apps, people continue to struggle with maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Along with entering the mobile health (mHealth) space with a health and wellness app, they also want to update their image by creating a new visual system that reflects their innovative and refreshed approach to wellness.
After observing people in my environment I decided to focus on time management. Time-management is something everyone at some point struggles with. My goal is to help people organize their needs, tasks, and goals so they can make time for the things that matter to them.
“Researchers found that productivity dropped as much as 40% when subjects tried to do more than two things at once.” (University of Michigan)
–Entrepreneur
Project Scope and Requirements
NWI’s long-term goal is to have native Android and iOS apps as well as a website. However, because there is I will be focusing on building the iOS application.
The features required by NWI are users being able to set up their profile setting goals and tracking progress, and sharing their stats with their wellness coaches. The UI should reflect a modern and fresh image.
Conducting Research
As a starting point, I drafted a Lean UX canvas to get an idea of what gaps I needed to fill in my understanding of time management.
This tool gave me a vague direction to follow when conducting my surveys and interviews. This caused me to ask questions like “What causes people to feel like they have no time?” and “How are people managing their day?”
This is where I defined success and failure metrics, as well as a preliminary Hypothesis to help guide me through this assignment.
Collecting Data
User Research
While I waited for my survey data to come back, I did some comparative analysis on companies that focused on similar topics. I did this to understand user expectations and possible areas for opportunity. What I found was that all the apps had some variant of a daily list feature, most apps focus on either task setting or goal setting, and the apps that offered both are paid. While many of the apps I reviewed tackle some of NWI’s needs, none of them offered all of the features that they were looking to offer.
Quantitative research
I collected 87 surveys from my target audience. Here are some of the results:
44% of users will put off waking up by pressing the snooze button in the morning.
56% of users make lists when they have multiple tasks to complete.
66% of users say they deal with some level of stress throughout the day.
After the survey results, I was left with many questions. I still didn’t feel like I hadn’t pinned my user's main pain point, but I was getting warmer. I wanted to dig deeper and interview people with different lifestyles to see what their needs were.
Qualitative research
I interviewed 6 different users from my target audience, overall I found that the majority of people like to keep mental tabs on the tasks they look to accomplish in a day. However, if a task is important or needs to be done immediately then
But overall the phrase I came across the most was:
after collecting all of my data I discussed my findings with my instructor we spoke about Jake Knapp’s Make Time and how people are not robots and life is constantly changing. This led me to ask “If we have to be flexible both at work and in our home lives, why don’t we treat our tasks in the same way?”
Empathy Map
Organizing your life is something that most people struggle with at some point(including myself), so it’s important to me to ground myself in the user so I can best develop a product that is actually needed and not what I think the user needs.
here's how I did it:
User Persona
I took the wants and needs as well as common pains of my users and created a living persona that best reflects the majority of my users.
Andy A. is a young professional he lives in Ft.lauderdale and is his mid 20’s. He is new to the professional workforce and is having trouble acclimating to life outside of school. After being out of school for a year he has noticed that he has a few bad habits that kill his productivity like distracting himself with social media. Andy has vague organization methods that get him through the day, but more often than not he forgets one key item or task.
The purpose of this journey map is to highlight that the persona reacts to life as it happens as opposed to being proactive.
Ideation
After collecting and organizing all of my data and using it to empathize with my user, I did a 20 min block of feature ideation. Here are some of the ideas that I thought would be the most useful for my users.
After letting all of my ideas out on to paper I organized all of my ideas based on Impact and effort. Because this sprint is limited on time my goal was not to reinvent the wheel, I want to develop the most impactful feature with the least amount of work.
My must-haves are
Goal setting
Tracking Progress
Communication with Coach/Mentor
Agile Scheduling
Low fidelity Wireframe
To get my ideas drawn onto paper I did 8, 1min. blocks to get my ideas for the mainframes onto paper.
I found that all the users didn't understand the gesture to open the main schedule. Similarly, they didn't understand the labeling for tasking.
In my translation to mid fidelity wireframes, I opted for a more simple layout to help simplify the overall experience for the user. This improved user flow greatly.
UI
Styletile
To help establish the overall look and feel of the product, the brand attributes I came up with were bright, sophisticated, and reliable.
High fidelity Wireframe
Next steps
Create color-coded task system for another layer of organization.
give the option to filter tasks based on their importance and or urgency.
Research possible recommender systems(similar to cookies, used by websites).
