Developing a Health & Wellness application that connects users with certified trainers, enabling them to achieve their fitness goals and improve their overall well-being.
The Client
Founded in 1977, the National Wellness Institute offers certification and training for wellness professionals and tools that they can use to help clients achieve their wellness goals. The company has been very successful over the years and their annual National Wellness Conference has become the most highly acclaimed professional conference in health and wellness.
The Problem
National Wellness Institute, a well-established player in the wellness industry, recognizes the importance of keeping up with the latest technology trends to stay competitive and add value to its members. In response to a drop in memberships, they are proactively investing in creating a suite of cutting-edge digital wellness tools, while also refreshing their brand image to reflect their commitment to innovation and member satisfaction.
This project was completed in a 9-day sprint, using the British Design Council’s Double Diamond process model. This agile process involves a number of phases in which designers will diverge and converge to generate viable solutions for the client based of data gathered directly from users.
Use of the Double Diamond process was ideal for me to process information and develop a viable solution to help our client and industry as a whole.
Used to identify where a potential Blue Ocean (uncontested marketplace) may lie, I developed a competitive feature analysis of eight competitors (4 direct & 4 indirect) and discovered two main opportunities
1. Accountability: Both direct and indirect competitors lack the functionality to help users be kept accountable for goals or challenges they set.
2. Personalization/Engagement: The lack of personalization towards each user could hinder their experience and increase bounce rates.
In the final step to uncover the blue ocean, I applied the trends of accountability and personalization/engagement to the x & y-axis respectively on the market positioning chart.
As you can see from the market positioning chart, I uncovered that the blue ocean lied within the upper right quadrant of high accountability and high personalization/engagement. This discovery indicated that there was an opportunity for the National Wellness Institute to develop and launch a product that would provides users with the tools to improve their accountability and engagement when it came to their personal health and wellness.
Before developing the interview and survey questions, I needed to define the business problems and outcomes along with who the users are and the benefits they are looking to receive from the potential product.
For the interviews and survey, my goal was to focus on developing questions that would align with opportunities I uncovered from the competitive feature analysis. After 36 surveyors had given me their feedback, it was evident that people contributed laziness and the lack of accountability as to why their personal health took a back seat to the rest of their lives. The encouraging nature of the data led to interviews with 10 users.
Though sending out a survey is the easiest and least time consuming method of gathering data, it does not always provide a true insight into user mental models. For this reason it is always important to conduct interviews that will provide you with quantifiable data. From my interviews, some key quotes that stood out to me were:
In the define phase, I now had the opportunity to make sense of the user data I collected from the stage prior to develop the Problem Statements and correlating How Might We's.
Using the affinity mapping tool, I organized all the data from my user research into similar groups.
I took note of key factors, quotes, frustrations and pain points that aligned with our market positioning axis and was able to summarize my findings into the following:
For those of you who are new to the industry (like myself), the value proposition canvas is an essential tool in helping define the job(s) that our product or service are being hired to accomplish.
At this stage in the design process, I turned my focus to the customer side of the value proposition canvas. The customer side helps further define the potential Pains, Gains and Jobs to Be Done.
Based on our discoveries, we were able to put a face to our user type and developed the user persona Wellness Wesley. Development of the user persona helped reduce the risk of losing sight of our users’ mental model.
With our user persona in place, I moved into developing the user journey and correlating phases that the users would be navigating through in their current state. After a few attempts, I settled on these four phases:
With the phases clearly defined, I moved into developing the User Journey map. Development of the User Journey Map allows for visualization and provides an opportunity to add context to each phase to identify Wellness Wesleys main pain points.
From the journey map, I was able to identify a number of areas for design opportunities, but focused on the two lowest points.
The two lowest points came within phases 2 and 3 respectively. The pain point uncovered in phase 2 focused on the frustrations users had when attempting to develop and set their personal wellness goals. In the third phase, the pain point focused on the difficulty users have when attempting to track their progress for goals or challenges they have set.
Combining the synthesized data from our research and reviewing the pain points within the journey map, I developed the following problem statements and correlating How Might We's:
Before starting the ideation process I laid out the needs, frustrations, and wants of the user based on data and research. The ideation process would help in brainstorming ways to solve pains and enhance the user’s gains.
At this stage, it would be beneficial to invite stakeholders to be apart of the brainstorming session. This would ensure that our ideas aligned with the business’ capabilities as well as creating a space where everyone gets a say. Unfortunately, I did not have access to stakeholders from the National Wellness Insititure and had to conduct brainstorming sessions with my fellow classmates.
Once I tapped my brain as well as classmates for potential ideas and solutions, I used the MoSCoW Method to priortize which of the ideated solutions we should immediately focus on.
I focused on the Must Have’s and Should Have’s from the MoSCoW Method and moved on to developing the MVP.
Based on our synthesized research, the main focus of the Minimum Viable Product was to develop:
User Flows provide a visualized reference of the product, features, and the paths users would take to interact with them. The user flow below is a quick glimpse and is quite simple compared to a fully conceptualized and developed product.
Developing the lo-fi and mid-fi prototypes allowed me to gather qualitative data on the potenital layout of the final product. Within both of the initial prototype stages, I made a number of pivots before settling on a “final” design.
With a rough outline of the layout and placement of “atoms”, I returned to the competitors used in the feature analysis and benchmarked their respective visual styles, color, and font choices.
The visual competitive analysis provides an opportunity to view how our competitors’ mobile applications are structured visually and identified key elements they used to persuade users to take action.
To help guide the design, I created 5 brand attributes and tested them with a style tile. Fortunately, I had an abundance of classmates on zoom and a very overbearing family that I could test — “don’t get me wrong I love them all dearly”. The 10 users that tested the style tile indicated that they felt safe, reliable and welcoming.
Ensuring consistency, I put together the atomic design inventory which included font styles, icons, buttons, and type fields that would be used throughout the mobile application.
I incorporated everything we learned through out our process to develop this polished prototype. It includes a number of micro-interactions and user flows that showcase the features we brainstormed, while staying aligned with the goals of the National Wellness Institute.
With the Double Diamond process complete, I was able to successfully create a mobile application that would provide personalized wellness routines, goal setting and coaching. In order to determine if the application would be a success or failure, I established a few key metrics that potential stakeholders could use to asses the viability of the product.
