Overview
The Apple Health app was created to help organize important health information and make it easy to access in a central and secure place. The Health app gathers health data from your iPhone, Apple Watch, and apps that you already use, so you can view all your progress in one convenient place. Health automatically counts your steps, walking, and running distances, sleep activity, tracking cycle. Analysis lets users see how health metrics like blood glucose, heart rate, and respiratory rate change over time. The Health app can incorporate data from tens of thousands of third-party apps that are designed to promote healthier habits — everything from nutrition to meditation to fitness.
The Problem
The iOS Health app of today looks as shown below – it aggregates data from different apps & shows the overall summary to users. With all the great features the Health app has the problem is Users don't visit it on a daily basis. I proposed feature improvements that increase the app’s DAU.
Questions & Observations
To help me better frame any problems with the product, I began by forming some questions and observations I have about the product.
- People like to see the progress of their efforts.
- People need to be motivated to reach their goals.
- People don't understand the value of the Health App and data collection.
- People are more motivated when seeing the progress of their efforts.
- People are visual learners.
At least 65% of people are “visual learners”.
This estimation comes from a research study on engineering students by Dr. Richard Felder in the 1980s, which later became a foundation for a standardized test called the Index of Learning Styles (ILS).
When [opening Health App], users [are overwhelmed by an amount of data it shows], which causes [frustrations and a feeling of being lost]
When [opening Health App], users [do not know how to interpret data and why it is usefull], which causes [not using an app on a daily basis]
When [opening Health App], users [have to scroll down to Highlights which shows interesting information about daily usage], which causes [not using an app on a daily basis]
🔍 UX Research
To confirm our observation and begin forming a hypothesis backed by data, I created a quick user survey to help form no-frill user personas and understand the problem space more from real users' perspectives.
Survey questions
- Are you an iPhone owner?
- Do you use Apple Health Mobile App?
- How often do you open Apple Health?
- How would you rate the overall experience of an app?
- What is the main reason you open the Health App?
- What would make you open the app more often?
- Do you find data visualization, statistics, and Highlights useful?
- If NO, why? What could be done better?
- If YES, please share some thoughts why you like them?
- Would you like the Health app to motivate you more to reach your goals and challenge you based on the data collected?
- If yes, please tell me how would you like to be motivated?
📊 Synthesis
Having shared my survey with users of the product, the next stage was focused on synthesizing the data to recognize trends and form a hypothesis.
Validated observations
By analyzing data from a survey and taking into consideration my conversations with friends and family, as well as doing some desk research I have coined the main frustration users may have.
Frustration
When [trying to reach their health and fitness goals ], users [are not feeling motivated enough to keep up when they don't see the progress], which results in [giving up or looking for other apps that offer personal coaching based on data and performance].
How Might We
With a picture of the problem at hand starting to come into place, I jumped into the ideation phase and worked through the solution design model, identifying users' actual behavior, and optimal behavior. This allowed me to form a how might we statement to begin forming a solution.
How might we better motivate users to help them reach their goals, stay active and be healthy?
Define your audience
With a Billion of iPhone users around the world, it is tempting to say "Our users are everyone". Avoiding any definitions of the target audience actually leads to a less usable experience for most people. In a real scenario, I would conduct user research to define an audience and their motivations for using this product.
For Hometask reasons, I have to create some assumptions based only on my knowledge of the quick survey findings and conversations with friends and family.
I have detected categories of people who have significantly different motivations for using this product as well as different groups inside this audience that have different needs
- Goal priority: people who may want to use the app for their own goals
- future mums
- people who want to lose weight
- people with severe or chronic health problems
- people with sleeping problems
- Domain knowledge: people who know more about the health and benefits of collecting data and interpretation
- doctors
- dietitians
- family members (interpreting older family members data)
For the Hometask reasons I have decided to create only one Persona that will serve me for the rest of the task but in a real scenario, I would create around 3-5 of them to better represent the audience.
Persona
User journey
Please, access User Journey HERE
Usability review and interface audit
Please, access the full usability review HERE
To detect any problems with the existing experience I conducted a Usability Review and was taken Usability criteria under consideration: functionality, Visual Design, efficiency, Learnability, navigation, consistency, feedback, accessibility. I have discovered some of the pain points users may have while using a product. While conducting the interface audit I have detected inconsistencies with the interface that requires fixing.
Ideation
To avoid following the first idea I conducted a series of ideation techniques. This allowed me to consider an array of solutions. Following ideation, I mapped what could be improved, added, and crazy ideas and prioritized them based on user value, business value, effort, and time.
| Selected | Name | User Value | Biz Value | Effort | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Accessibility issues: colour contrast, typography legibility | High | High | Low | Low | |
rearrange an order of sections | Medium | Medium | Low | Low | |
change cards shape to better utylise space and make start screen more visually appealing | High | High | Low | Medium | |
top header with image and user photo | Medium | Medium | Low | Low | |
we can add the most interesting and motivating highlight on top to focus users attention and couriosity to visit app more often | High | High | Low | Low | |
add a highlight that is different every time user open an app | High | High | Medium | Medium | |
improve stats visualisations | High | Medium | Medium | Medium | |
better visualize your Health data | High | High | High | Medium |
| Selected | Name | User Value | Biz Value | Effort | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
adding tabs on summary screen to quickly switch between content and avoid endless scrolling | High | Medium | Medium | Medium | |
adding a functionality to change an order of favourites | High | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Today view with morning and evening activities | High | Medium | Medium | Medium | |
video with successfull stories | High | High | High | Medium | |
add more graphs and visual stats | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | |
add personalised push notifications to every category with time and date set up option | High | Medium | Medium | Medium | |
add an option to share the highlight on social media | High | High | Medium | Medium |
| Selected | Name | User Value | Biz Value | Effort | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
add personlised motivations from celebrities who have similar goals | High | High | High | High | |
add a survey that helps to personalise experience | High | High | High | High | |
daily/weekly/monthly/yearly challanges | High | High | Medium | Medium | |
kudos form friends and family | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium |
✍️ Hypothesis
Having prioritized ideas based on what can be improved, added, or crazy ideas, I wrote a hypothesis that helps me frame the problem for the user and business goals.
Users' goal is to stay healthy and be motivated.
The business goal is to increase DAU - the number of active users who visit your app in a single day.
We believe that by adding daily customizable challenges we can create a habit of opening an app for seeing results of efforts which will increase the number of users visiting an app on a daily basis.
✏️ Rapid Sketching
Following the creation of my hypothesis, I rapidly sketched solutions in lo-fidelity. This helped me quickly map and understand the current product and consider options for how I could iterate directly in the product.
Styles & Components
To create the high fidelity prototype I inspected the style of the products and followed IOS User Interface Guidelines to easily create a prototype that was consistent with those guidelines. Before creating the prototype I defined styles and components to easily and quickly help me design consistently. User interface review shows some usability problems as a consequence I am proposing some improvements in the style of an existing app.
High Fidelity Prototype
Below is the final version of the prototype that I created. I included interactions and transitions from Figma to match the flow of the product.
Testing
With the hi-fi prototype created I formed a testing script with scenarios and tasks for the user to complete to validate the prototype with real users. To test the prototype I used Maze and gathered feedback following every task.
🔦 Testing Hypothesis:
We believe that by adding daily customizable challenges we can create a habit of opening an app for seeing results of efforts which will increase the number of users visiting an app on a daily basis.
⛳ Goal and metrics
Main goal: The main goal of the test is to uncover whether users can easily add new challenges to the pool of challenges they already participate in.
🛠 Using Maze we will be measuring
- Time spent completing tasks
- Time spent navigating to discover advisors
- Successful task completion
- Question response rate
- Users feedback and complain about the experience
✅ Tasks and follow up questions
User Goal
Can users easily add new challenges to the pool of challenges?
Task Attracted by the challenges you have completed you want to add more challenges that may motivate you to reach your goals and stay healthy.
Find out if there are any challenges that help you be more active in the afternoon.
Follow up questions
- How easy was it to complete this task?
- Was there anything confusing about this experience?
- Do you have any thoughts on how can we improve this experience?
Maze Test
The Maze test is currently live and I am collecting data and user feedback that will help me evaluate my design decisions and improve design and experience.
Please, feel free to participate in this user testing!
Outcome
The outcome...