Research to Branding, a Wellness App Case Study // Ironhack UX/UI Project #5

Overview

Brief: Research an area of wellness, defined by the National Wellness Institute (NWI), and design a mobile application for this area of wellness. The application must include:

- An area to be able to set up their profile to include important information relevant to their goals

- An area to be able to set goals and track their progress

- An area to be able to share their stats with their wellness coaches

Role: This is a project conducted during Ironhack’s immersive UX/UI bootcamp and all aspects of the project were completed by myself, Matt Dutton.

Timeframe: 10 day design sprint

Tools Used: Figma, Useberry, Maze

Problem & Goal:

In this challenge I was tasked with creating an application for NWI to conquer an area of wellness of my choosing and to help people develop a healthy routine for themselves. The areas of wellness are defined by NWI in their Dimensions of Wellness chart and I chose emotional wellness as my area of focus. The goal is to create an easy to use application where users can set, track and share their goals, communicate with their coach from NWI, and offer value to the user to boost their emotional wellness.

The Process

Discovery: Business Analysis

I started my discovery phase of the design thinking process with the lean UX canvas. The canvas gives the big picture of what to build, why we are going to build it, and for who we’re building it for.

The canvas is based on some assumptions that have to be made about the business, its users and what the potential user benefits may be. I was able to define the business problems, ideal business outcomes, the users and the user benefits.

Main Takeaways:

• The main business problem is that NWI lacks a updated interface where users can take care of their emotional wellness needs in one place
• The ideal business outcome would be to drive traffic to the application through NWI’s coaching program and add value for the user to boost their emotional wellness
• The user base is 21–35 year olds
• The user benefits would be tracking and sharing your emotional wellness with your coach and offering a healthy routine building system

After setting the stage with the lean UX Canvas I began to analyze the competition via a feature comparison chart. I listed out the direct and indirect competitors and what they offer, and then highlighted the feature gaps that the competitors had.

Main Takeaways:

• The direct competition in the wellness app industry offered a similar mental model, offering some guided practices and exercises
• The feature gaps were a lack of sleep assistance, affirmations, and instructional videos

After the feature comparison I moved into completing the market positioning chart. This chart helps me map out the blue ocean strategy, where there is a market gap with little to no competition. While I was able to identify and understand the competition, I also discovered that the opportunity to stand out in the market was offering a guided application that can be more personalized.

Main Takeaways:

• Most of the competitors offered less personalization to their apps
• Most of the competitors offered a more self-paced experience as opposed to a guided experience
• Two of the lead competitors, Calm & Headspace, offered the most features and is the mental model for most users

Discover: User & Secondary Research

After understanding where there is a possible opportunity in the market I conducted some user research. I wrote a transcript and completed four interviews where I was enlightened by what the participants had to say.

Important Quotes:

“I tend to stress myself out with the way that I think so, I try to talk myself into better places. Doing affirmations or mantras to keep myself focused.”- Bridgette

“Mental health is a wide category that can deal with depression and anxiety, but at the same time it can deal with your overall health and well being, your mood. So yeah, I think there is a stigma with mental health.” -Adam

“If your mental state is poor it affects your physical health and things like that. ” — Megan

Main Takeaways:

• One thing I found out that validated an assumption I had was that there still is a stigma with mental health awareness
• This stigma may prevent some users from wanting to better themselves in the first place, thus leading to high churn rates when using emotional wellness apps
• All of the interviewees expressed that they have tried a emotional wellness app before, such as Calm or Headspace, but never stuck with it and developed a routine
• All of the interviewees had experimented with self affirmations before, whether it be talking to themselves in their thoughts or speaking to themselves in the mirror for a pep talk

I was curious after my interviews and dove deep into some secondary research into the wellness app industry, and I found that business is booming. There are so many people out there who want to improve their emotional wellness and a lot of competition with thousands of apps available.

After gathering such insightful feedback from my user interviews and going more in depth with some secondary research, I sent out a user survey that received 40 responses.

Main Takeaways:

• Survey results matched market trends of increased use of emotional wellness apps
• Users found the aspect of emotional health as extremely important to them

Define

Now that I had some real user research to go on, I moved into defining the problems that users face. The information I gathered so far I organized into an affinity map. The map helps me visualize and label important chunks of information like users habits and how they deal with stress in their lives.

Main Takeaways:

• Users usually use similar methods to calm down or reaffirm themselves when stressed, such as giving a pep talk in the mirror
• The secondary research I completed showed how much growth the wellness app industry is experiencing and will have in the near future

Now that I was able to visualize the data from user research I began mapping what the customer’s main jobs were on the value proposition canvas. These jobs can be functional like meditating or doing yoga, emotional such as coping with loss, or social, like being more mindful and aware in everyday life.

Main Takeaways:

• Pains are not the opposite of gains, gains can be hidden ambitions and are more than just a functional job
• Users have many different reasons to hire a wellness application to completed their desired job

Next I wanted to distill all of this user information into one simple source, so I created a user persona. The persona, Affirmation Annie, highlighted all the major pain points users faced while using emotional wellness applications and is based on real data gathered from users.

Main Pain Points:

• Users who are dealing with imposter syndrome are constantly needing to reaffirm themselves
• Users have poor time management to make time for themselves, or they are just too wrapped up in their busy lives and forgetting all together.

I then put the persona through an as is scenario. This tool takes the place of task analysis to break down what the persona is doing and how they are thinking and feeling during a given scenario. In this case the scenario was going through an average work day and not being able to find time to practice self-care.

Main Takeaway:

• While this tool is based on some assumptions of how the persona would act in a given scenario it is extremely helpful to visualize a use case

To further visualize how Annie would react, I used a user journey map to find design opportunities in the pain points that she was experiencing.

Main Takeaways:

• Pain points exist throughout the day for the persona, not just at one specific point
• Some opportunities for design were that the persona is lacking in time in their schedule and to develop a quick exercise they can complete, a lack of motivation and a hard time falling asleep

Problem Statements

Now that I have used data to see where user’s biggest issues are I was able to define four main problem statements.

So now that the problems users are facing are defined how might we help users find time, affirm their self confidence, fall asleep faster and feel not quite so alone on this mental health journey?

Ideate

I laid out all four actionable how might we statements and came up with as many ideas as I could to help alleviate user pains. Of course there is always an opportunity to come back to this if I were to gather more research and unlock some more ideas, but for now I came up with 28 individual solutions.

Develop

I took the ideas from the brainstorming session to develop them and prioritize the features I could include in the NWI application. I first mapped out the ideas in an impact vs effort chart, this really helped me visualize what features I could include in the product based on the value they would bring.

Main Takeaways:

• High impact ideas such as offering one on one appointments between a wellness coach and the user booked right through an app will provide value in the market
• There are many ideas that are viable solutions, but some require too much effort and resources to bring a minimal impact to the business

I took my high impact and low effort features into a MoSCoW chart. This is where I decided on what features I must have in the MVP, along with others that I should or could have in future versions. It’s important to note that there’s a feature listed here that touches on each problem statement, this way the MVP will help solve all of the main pain points.

After prioritizing and selecting the features that will go into the MVP I used the business side of the value proposition canvas.This side of the map lists the jobs that the app will do with the features and where the gain creators and the pain relievers are for the user in order to create a more valuable experience.

Now that I have completed both sides of the value proposition canvas I confirmed that an app with the prioritized features included would be a good product market fit.

Main Takeaways:

• The customers jobs to be done match up with the features the application will provide
• Gain creators and pain relievers are not opposites of each other, they are opportunities for the product to add value to the user

MVP

Confirmation of the product market fit allowed me to go ahead and create my MVP statement. This summarizes what will be going into the application and it reads:

“The MVP is an application that allows users to communicate with a wellness coach through a text chat and book appointments for one on one sessions, track & record self affirmations, and offers meditation practices & music to help users sleep.”

Now that I have the MVP statement I defined the jobs to be done statements for both the overall job story and the feature job story.

Job Story

When practicing self care the user wants to be encouraged so they can have a positive mindset.

Feature Job Story

When communicating with a wellness coach the user wants to receive encouragement and guidance so they can reach their goals.

When tracking their affirmations and meditations the user wants to remember what they have done before so they can see their progress.

Value Proposition Statement

With the jobs to be done statements defined I summed up the market value with a value proposition statement. This statement summarizes the value the application will bring to the users.

“Our application helps users who want to practice self care and improve their emotional wellness by reducing self doubt, receive encouragement from a wellness coach, and better their sleeping habits.”

Develop

I first started the develop stage of the design thinking process with this user flow. This flow is going through the onboarding of the app and where the key features are.

Lo-Fi Prototype

After developing the initial user flow I went and completed a rapid prototype. The goal of this prototype is to fail quickly and to solely focus on the flow of the app itself.

Main Takeaways:

• 5 Testers
• While I had a 100% success rate on the flow there were some issues with the taxonomy of the onboarding screens
• The testers said they would like to see the features a little more in depth instead of just where they are in the app

Pivot!

Taking the findings I uncovered in the lo-fi prototyping I had a small pivot in the user flow. The test results showed that users wanted a more in depth understanding of the app itself rather than just the on boarding, so I developed a longer and more complete user flow.

Mid-Fi Prototype

Taking this new flow I put together some mid-fi wireframes into another quick prototype. This time with a little more detail, and I received some interesting usability test results.

Main Takeaways:

• It was overall a success with a 100% completion rate for the 5 testers I had
• There were some misclick issues with some features like the coach portal being difficult to find
• UI being too small or cluttered with poor spacing

Visual Design

Now that I had the user flow set and the features aligned I decided on brand attributes for the new application. The attributes I found most in tune for this type of app were:

• Calming
• Nurturing
• Caring
• Matriarchal
• Relaxed

I gathered inspiration from various brands through visual competitive research, who had similar attributes and then created a mood board.

I conducted five desirability tests on the mood board to make sure the brand attributes were lining up with the aesthetic.

Main Takeaways:

• 5 out of 5 users said the mood board gave them a calming feeling
• 4 out of 5 users said the mood board gave them a relaxed feeling
• 4 out of 5 users said the mood board gave them a motherly feeling
• The desirability tests aligned right on with the brand attributes I had set, which was pretty exciting and I couldn’t wait to start developing my hi-fi’s

Before diving into the hi-fi’s though I developed a style tile where I defined my typefaces and button style that matched the brand attributes as well as finding a name for the application.

I chose to go with mirur

I also conducted desirability testing on the style tile with exact results as the tests on the mood board, this gave me confidence to then build out my atomic design inventory. Using an inventory like this helped keep me organized and helped me build faster as I got into my hi-fi’s.

While the atomic design inventory took a while to make, it is so much better to be organized at the beginning then changing many elements throughout designing the hi-fis. Using each element I was able to build out the hi-fi’s in good time.

Hi-Fi Prototype

The hi-fi prototype walks through the initial onboarding screens of the application and then takes you through the process of recording an affirmation, saving it, viewing your streaks, and setting up an appointment with your coach.

Success & Failure Metrics

Looking at some failure metrics, high churn rate is one that stands out, as we’ve seen from research there are a lot of people who try an app and don’t stick with it, I hope to change that. Of course success would look like high daily active users, positive feedback from users and coaches and overall value.

Next Steps

Some next steps would definitely be following up with the users and interviewing them to see if they gained any value from the app, a/b testing different designs, and of course refining micro interactions in the app and adjusting the UI to be more precise.

Learnings

Overall this project was unbelievably rewarding. From diving deep into the research to find out the users pain points and needs, to defining and developing a brand it was really exciting. I look forward to creating more brands in the future.

Thanks for reading!