Vitamia - Healthcare App
Background:
Vita is a non-profit health and fitness start-up with a vision to apply behavioural science to help inspire and enable people to change their habits and live free of chronic disease.
Mission:
Empowers people to achieve a healthier, fuller life through sustainable lifestyle change.
Values:
We believe giving people the education and ability to make better decisions you give them the power to live better lives.
Business Goal:
To scale their existing program to a digital product and gain an audience of 100 million users by 2023.
Vita Overview:
According to the Australian Institute of health and welfare (AIHW), Australia #1 killer is Coronary Heart Disease. The most insane part — It’s preventable.
70–90% of cases are preventable through making better life choices.
Our client Vita has a in person program and what they needed from us was to scale the program via a digital product.
Here’s what the in-person program focuses on:
- Change in their food habits
- Increase their activity levels
- Learn how to deal with challenges
- Reinforce their habits
What they’ve learnt from scientifically testing the in-person program and the proven results:
- Participants that celebrate small wins, regularly tend to do meet their goals of living better lives
- Positive reinforcement increases motivation to track their diet and weight loss
- Vita’s greatest value to the market comes via smart technology.
“We need an interface that helps people monitor what they put in their body, and celebrate what they don’t because helping people eat better is the first step in fighting chronic diseases” — Vita
Vita’ research suggests that the best way to reach their business goals would be to effectively implement a plant-based diet into the lives of our users, with the MVP focusing on helping people eat better.
My team & role:
Our group for the project was Maria, Elle, Shelley and I. We created a team charter, timeline, team expectations and outlined each person’s role and key responsibilities together.
My role: UX designer
Throughout this project I specifically worked on:
- Market research
- Survey and survey distribution by Slack and social media
- User interviews: guerrilla and formal
- Research synthesis through Affinity Mapping
- User flow
- Ideation
- Paper prototyping
- Mid-fi prototyping
- Usability testing and iteration
- Hi-fi prototype
The Process:
We had a two week sprint working remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions and we followed the double diamond process throughout the project with collaborative consensus tools in project delivery.
Discover
We assumed our problem is largely psychologically based so having a spread of insights would give us a wider overview of the psychological process that influence people to make a transition to a healthier lifestyle.
The team came up with the following assumptions:
- Link between mental health and diet influences habit
- Social and environmental influences on food choice
- People make lifestyle choices that are convenient
We kicked start our research journey in different areas:
Market research, competitive analysis, habits and behavioural science
Market Research
The digital health market is expected to reach US$206 billion by 2020* and expected to continue grow in the coming years. But there’s a lot of competition, consumers can now choose from no fewer than 300,000 mobile healthcare applications.
*Statistic from statista.com
We looked into brands such as MyFitnessPal, MyPlate and My Net Diary and Omada app just to name a few. This gave us an understanding of who, where and how our competitors were operating in the market.
Competitive Analysis
We looked at direct and indirect competitors and did competitive analysis in order to understand who they are, what their features are, and where to find them.
And we deep dived on our main competitors:
Through our feature analysis we identified that all the apps adopted the use of smart technology, consisted of a clean/smooth interface and featured a community/support aspect. The main functions are counting calories and/or tracking exercise and weight.
How could Vita be different?
A positioning map helped visualise the opportunity:
How do you facilitate sustainable change?
Tiny gains are small decisions made frequently that move you slowly and steadily forward. They start small and add up to something big.
The math is simple. If you focus on simply getting 1% better every day, in 365 days you will be almost 38 times better.
Survey
We conducted survey based on the assumption we had, and gather qualitative data to understand our potential target audiences’ attitudes, and behaviours.
Quickly gathering 25 responses we learnt..
Key Insights:
- People go online first for health information
- People consider to have healthy diet
- Their eating habit influenced by their social behaviour
User Interviews
As the vita program was preventative, we wanted to talk to a user group at risk of chronic disease in later life. We focused our research on users aged 25–44 and conducted 27 in-person interviews.
Define
Affinity Mapping
Through affinity mapping on Miro, we were able to synthesis the research by organising the notes in groups and sorting them into categories collaboratively.
Findings:
- People are influenced by partners/friends
- Upbringing affects choices people make with their emotional connection
- Mental health & fitness plays key part in overall health
- People search for information on the internet with their mobile
- People are influenced by physical appearance
Persona
After all the research and synthesising, the insights reinforced our persona, it also revealed to us that instead of one we had 2 unique personas.
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Empathy Mapping
Visualising user attitudes and behaviours in an empathy map helps our team to align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Problem Statement
Finally we came to our problem statement..
Charlie needs a way to take control of his own health because he is easily influenced by his peers and life around him.
Develop
HMW Statements
- HMW help Charlie to engage in healthy behaviour
- HMW educate Charlie on the benefits of a healthy overall lifestyle
- HMW use peoples social connection to food to their benefit
- HMW encourage Charlie to change his eating habit in healthy behaviour
This allowed our group to understand what we can start to tackle for our MVP.
Ideation
Crazy 8’s — 2 Rounds
We chose to focus on 2 HMW statements for our crazy 8s. We did 2 rounds and we discussed our ideas and ended up the session with voting. We decided some best ideations that we thought we could continue working on it.
Solution Storyboard
Hypothesis
We believe that providing friendly alternative options to our users will help them to make better decisions on their healthy behaviour. We would know this to be true when most of the Vitamia App users enrol in the Vita health care program.
User Flow
Deliver
Low-Fi Wireframes and Prototyping
Usability Testing
Testing with 5 people we had some common feedbacks:
- “‘Help!’ feels like it’s in emergency”
- “The double click to next step is confusing and inconvenient”
- “Could it be showing progress on the log page?”
- “Can have more options in the biggest challenges”
Mid-Fi Prototyping
We learned from the paper prototype and decided to move onto a Mid-fi digital prototype.
Usability Testing
Tested with 3 people, the feedback was generally positive, but our users gave us some valid key insights:
- The progress chart can show more details
- The options of the choices are limited
- Just showing the veggie burger image is not motivated enough
Hi-Fi Prototyping
We tried to iterate on the second round of feedbacks and did the Hi-fi prototype.
Next Steps
- Test and iterate the Hi-fi prototype
- Rollout for testing with real users and make improvements based on feedback and analytics
- Test on our secondary user group and iterate based on feedback
- Integrate native food & activity logging so the app will be usable for wider audiences
Learnings
Working with this project showed me:
- the true meaning of MVP
- the value of the project plan and having a deadline to stop researching
- how to streamline secondary research to confirm findings
- how to incorporate test findings into iterative prototyping
- how business values form brand identity
I love the saying fail fast, fail often. I was proud of what we achieved in 2 weeks and am thankful to my team for the excellent communication and teamwork.
