Role
Project Manager
UX Researcher
UX Designer
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Teammates
Erica Congemi, Lead Designer
Naomi Schilpp, Lead Researcher
Anita Trinh, Information Architect
Timeline
2.5 weeks
Daily Health Coaching for a Busy Woman
About Your Daily
Our client, the creator of Your Daily, created a daily health coaching app for users that she described as a "busy, Type A woman" who suffered from burnout, autoimmune and gut health disorders and needed a way to stay consistent with a health and wellness routine.
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To do this, Your Daily, creates custom health education tracks for users based on an initial assessment. Users are given daily lessons, activities, affirmations and resources that address both mental and physical health.
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The Opportunity
Our client wanted to improve user retention, interactive user experience, and organization of the site.
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The Goals
We created the following goals to focus our designs and to address our client's needs:
Conduct user research to validate current design choices and to implement improvements in user experience.
Improve user retention, past 33 days, with increased encouragement, interactivity and "gamification" to improve stickiness of the app.
Improve “dry” user experience, with improved UI, user encouragement, and streamlined flow. Keep the current design system.
Improve user ability to navigate the app quickly and easily by creating an intuitive flow and easy to find frequently used features.
Health and wellness app "must haves"
Market research showed that many other health and wellness apps have user favorite features that increased overall user experience and retention
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Encouragements
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Progress
Tracker
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Filters for
Resources
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Rewards
for Completion
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Discover Page
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What do the users need?
We conducted user interviews with users that currently use health and wellness apps and have burnout, autoimmune or gut health disorders to find out what they look for in an a health app. ​
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Using an affinity map, we found the following user needs:
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"I need a way to quickly track my health and create consistent routines to be successful."
"I like getting external encouragement and education."
"I like things to be accessible and visually pleasing so I can easily track my progress."
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We were also able to understand the following user behaviors and validate current design decisions:
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Users found the journaling tool very helpful.
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Users prefer short daily lessons, time is of the essence.
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Users would like a community feature.
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Meet Kate
We used the information from user interviews to create a persona, Kate.
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Kate recently opened a small business with her husband. She pours her heart into her business but has noticed her anxiety and fatigue have increased since the opening of her business and the stress of the pandemic. She was recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and told by her medical team that she must prioritize her health and maintain a routine. Kate signed up for Your Daily 2 weeks ago in order to feel supported in her health journey. She enjoys Your Daily but is not motivated to consistently use the app.
Goals:
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Encouragement
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Stay on top of health goals
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Find a community for support
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Feel and see progress in her health
Frustrations:
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It's difficult to find favorite tools, such as journaling
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Unclear what is resources are available
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Unsure of big picture view of plan
What is current Your Daily experience?
I created a current user flow and journey map to better understand Kate's current experience. Hover on box to expand.
The user flow shows that in order for a user to start journaling, there is repetition and confusion to get to the journaling tool.
The current journey map shows that Kate becomes less motivated as she uses the app. The lack of external encouragement and difficulty in finding her tool makes it less likely she will return.
Creating a more supportive app
Based on our user research and client requests, the team started brainstorming the best way to create a more supportive app to improve user experience and retention.
We wanted to focus on the following changes:
Create a more delightful UI, with personalization and improved visuals to attract users and encourage them to continue.
Create a tracker and use external encouragements for users to maintain consistency on the app and be motivated by their process thus far.
Improve information architecture and layout of the menu to create a more intuitive and streamlined user flow.
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Create clarity in a users progress through lessons by better organizing and visually representing current progress.
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Per client request, for our prototypes, we kept our clients current design system and colors.
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In our mid-fidelity prototype we made the following changes to address the pain points we found in user research:
Mid Fidelity Prototype
Personalization for the user
Streaks in home page to motivate
Important tools such as journaling
and daily lessons easy to access on
home page
Course progress bar to for user
context
Clear indicators of completed courses
and time needed for courses.
A personalized check list for external encouragement
An achievements page with badges and a calendar
Pop ups for encouragement when completing a task
A list of lessons, both in progress and completed
What did the users think?
During usability testing on our mid-fi prototype we asked users to complete the following tasks:
1. You would like to journal. Show me how you would do that.
2. You have completed your daily lesson and would like to track how far into the module you are. Show me how you would do that.
3. You are looking for a new smoothie recipe. Show me how you would do that.
Results: Journaling was easier
Task 1: All users were successful in journaling in less than 30 seconds with less than 2 errors.
Takeaways: Users enjoyed having a journaling option from the home page. They liked the ability to input their emotions before journaling and the personalization of the prompts.
Results: Visual hierarchy of tracking was confusing
Task 2: Users had a difficult time understanding the information on the task page but enjoyed the achievements page.
Takeaways: Need to establish improved visual hierarchy of the tasks page. To improve motivation and experience create a more inviting progress bar and declutter the page.
Results: Unclear what additional resources were available
Task 3: Users did not expect to find recipes on the site and were not sure where to look.
Takeaways: Make items available in the "explore" page more clear with filters. Decrease clutter of the explore page to decrease cognitive overload of the user.
Giving the users what they want
Taking the feedback from usability testing into account we made a few changes when creating our hi-fi prototype.
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Kept the journaling front and center, but with more options.
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Improve visual hierarchy on the task page by moving the favorites, progress rings instead of progress bars and kept the task list simple.
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Achievements page as default, so users feel more motivated by their accomplishments.
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Create consistency of progress rings into the courses page.
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Add filters to the explore page for clarity of what is available.
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Create full screen encouragements after task completion to avoid confusion with ads.
Usability improved by 5 SUS points
System Usability Scale (SUS) Scores increased by over 5 points with our changes. Users were overall able to complete tasks with less errors and less time.
Next steps
Based on client feedback and iterating on the process, in future iterations I would like to:
Build out the community feature.
Users made it clear that they wanted connection and community on their health journey. (Our client asked us not to focus on this feature as they had it planned out already).
Provide clarity for users between daily lesson, modules, tasks and courses. Working with our client to ensure the difference between the lessons and courses was clear to avoid user confusion.
Design and test a bottom navigation feature. Based on market research and client request, bottom navigation could improve user flow and aesthetics of the app.
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Reiterate and design other options for the resources page to see if there is a way to better organize and promote featured products for the user.
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Reflection
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User data from interviews is key, however, with more time I would have liked to design and test more features that did not come up during user interviews and testing.
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Finding the fine line between user and client needs is difficult, but fun. Luckily our client was very receptive to changes, but being the user's voice and finding the best way to balance it with client needs was important.
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Pick your battles: I recognized that there were improvements that could have been made to the current on boarding process and the importance of a community feature, but based on our user and client needs we focused on current app function and features.