By Alex Mays
About Health Hero
Health Hero is a health and wellness habit-building app that focuses on helping users create healthy habits that improve their mental wellness, fitness, and nutrition. The goal of Health Hero is to help motivate people to improve themselves, get healthier, and feel better by discovering and building new habits that appeal to them that can be added to their everyday routines. Health Hero also offers a Calendar feature where users can adjust which days and times they do activities, Another great feature is the social feature where users can chat and compete with their friends.
The guidelines for this project were pretty open-ended, with the only overarching requirement being that the app must be related to health and wellness, so I had the freedom to be able to create this idea for Health Hero based on my user feedback and my research and creativity. I was drawn to this project because I have a tremendous passion for self-improvement and this is an amazing and convenient way for users to be able to improve their lives and get healthier at their own pace in a personalized fashion. I am most passionate about working on projects that help people in some way in their real lives. I find myself gravitating to projects that can help people to improve themselves, and this is a perfect example of that.
Role:
UX / UI Designer
Tools Used:
– Figma (for design and prototypes)
– Miro (for user flows and sitemap)
– Canva (for user personas and affinity map)
Duration:
2 ½ Months
Key Features
Fitness Plan
Meal Plan
The fitness plan feature allows users to create their own workouts and customize exercises. Each exercise can be customized by repetitions and frequency. This will also track calories burned and muscles targeted by each activity.
The meal planner feature allows users to plan for as many days as they would like by adding recipes to their breakfast, lunch, dinner, and daily snacks. Each recipe will come with its own nutritional information, allowing users to stay organized while meeting their nutritional goals.
Adding Habits
Calendar Feature
The habits page contains three categories: Fitness, Nutrition, and Mental Wellness. In each of these categories, there are content pages where users can search, or browse for habits that work well for them. When adding habits the scheduling can be customized as well as the frequency and intensity.
The calendar feature is where users can customize their schedules, edit habits, and get an outlook of what activities are coming up and when.
Initial Hypothesis
I came up with some potential problems and solutions to get an idea of how to create a health and wellness app design that could be beneficial for individuals looking to improve their health.
Potential Problems
1 – Users may be lacking the motivation to form healthy habits. Achieving goals and making significant progress requires patience, persistence, and dedication, which takes motivation.
2 – Health and wellness information isn’t all in one place which can be confusing and difficult to keep up with. (There are separate apps for fitness, sleep, mental wellness, etc.)
3 – Users may not have the right information that will help them maximize their physical and mental health.
4 – Users may struggle with time management and organization. Other apps may also require too much effort by demanding too much from the user.
5 – Existing health and wellness apps and programs may not be personalized and tailored to users enough.
Potential Solutions
1 – A solution for users lacking motivation is to create an app that is fun to use, rewarding, encouraging, and gives a sense of accomplishment and progression. These elements will add motivation by creating an experience that is enjoyable but also makes users feel like they are on the right track by adding habits and making improvements.
2 – A solution for information being all over the place would be to create an app that contains all relevant aspects of health and wellness pertaining to both mental and physical well-being in one place. This will include things like fitness plans, mental wellness, fertility, nutrition, healthy habits, personalized medical recommendations, and more.
3 – A solution for users not having enough knowledge on certain health subjects would be to ensure that this app makes things easy to understand in order to help users’ mental and physical wellness and make sure users feel that they understand their health and also feel understood about what could be helpful to them.
4 – A solution for users struggling with time management and organization would be to make sure the app is simple, efficient, and easy to use. It will be designed in such a way that interactions are understandable and organized.
5 – A solution for users wanting more of a personalized health and wellness experience is to create a customizable app that helps users get tailored help with improving their physical and mental health.
Problem Statement
Our health-conscious users need a way to create healthy habits for self-improvement in both mental and physical well-being in a rewarding way because users wish to reach their goals and improve themselves in various health and wellness categories.
We will know this to be true when we see the vast majority of our users setting goals, making progress, and reach their goals, and staying on track within at least 6 months (user engagement data & user retention).
Research
Key Takeaways
I started my research by conducting several user interviews to understand users’ health and wellness goals, which features they would be looking for in an app, and understand their likes and dislikes of other similar health and wellness apps.
I divided up the insights that I received into four categories: Motivation and app features, physical health, mental health, and nutrition. Here were the key takeaways from my interviews:
Physical Health:
- Users want to track workouts automatically without having to put in information.
- Users want their fitness plans to be both inclusive of outdoor and indoor workouts
- Users want a variety of workout options that fit their lifestyles.
Nutrition:
- Users want a variety of food options that fit their dietary wants and needs that can help them achieve their individual health goals.
- Users would like to track nutrients and calories easily.
Mental Wellbeing:
- Users want a variety of options for improving mental wellness that can fit in easily and seamlessly with their busy daily routines.
Motivation & App Features:
- Users want to see their progress and feel a sense of encouragement to increase motivation. They are also motivated through socializing with friends.
- Users want to link their app with other apps and devices to transfer information easier and increase convenience.
- Users care about good visual appeal and want video/visual learning style primarily.
User Flow
Based on the results from my user research, I began to create some user flows to get an idea of what the interactions on the app would look like, and how users could achieve the goals that they set out to do.
User Personas
I created two user personas based on my user research that both have a different set of goals when it comes to improving their health and wellness, but can both be ideal users for Health Hero. Camila is more focused on nutrition and physical wellness, while Bradley is focused on improving his mental wellbeing.
Sitemap
Next, I created a sitemap. This would be the structure of how I would design my prototype. The pages were initially based on my user interviews and then the sitemap was improved by doing a card sorting exercise with several participants.
Usability Testing
I created a clickable design in Figma that was low-mid fidelity, just to get a basic idea of how the app would function and so I could test it with users.
Low/Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Usability Testing Results
I conducted usability tests with six different people. The goal of the usability testing was to figure out which elements could be improved. The participants each had a unique set of interests, knowledge, and approaches to improving their health. The participants all had an interest in health and wellness. I conducted three usability tests in person and three remotely.
Scenario Tasks:
- You’re overwhelmed by the stresses of your daily life and want to find a habit to help your mental wellness. How would you find and add a mental wellness habit?
- You have a busy schedule and are interested in preparing your meals in advance to save time. How would you create a meal plan?
- Something just came up tomorrow morning and you’re going to be busy during the morning when you scheduled your habit. How would you go about editing your schedule?
Solutions
Based on the feedback from usability testing, preference testing, and user interviews, I began designing my high-fidelity prototype. I made sure to implement my solutions to the user feedback, and I continued to keep open communication with users, as well as my mentor and tutor while designing this to make sure it was high quality. I made sure to create the high-fidelity prototype with visual design principles, emotional design, spacing fundamentals, and accessibility all in mind.
Prototype
High Fidelity
Future Ideas
My new hypothesis: Users need to find habits that suit their wants and needs. Users also need a way to learn the importance of these habits and how they can be implemented successfully into their daily lives.
My solution: Create content that is motivating, entertaining, and valuable for users. Adding more detail to the content pages and the lessons will increase user satisfaction and achievements.
Predicted result: With better and more detailed content, user engagement and satisfaction with the app will increase significantly. Users will have more habits added and rank up within our app.
Areas to improve next: The areas that stand out to me for needing improvements would be adding content that is fully functional and has complete habits. I will be developing the concepts of the meal plan recipes so that each recipe contains nutritional information that contributes to the daily user goals. I will also expand on the fitness activities, giving estimates for calories burned or muscle groups used. Another aspect of Health Hero that could use improvements is the motivational aspect. There are leaderboards and goals on the dashboard, but it’s unclear how users earn XP and rank up and how users can set goals for themselves beyond habits and how users gain achievements. All these areas need to develop more to maximize the app experience and deliver a more complete higher-quality app experience.