Busy juggling too many tasks? Helping Singaporeans become healthier through Healthy365 app

The Daily Essentials To Life

Look at those green pastures out there, oh I mean the different nature reserves and National Parks in Singapore, the nice and cosy parks in the midst of office buildings and the green scenery with some pretty little flowers around the condos and HDBs. Be honest, who really have time to enjoy those sceneries? Underutilised right due to our daily lifestyle and Covid-19? Hmm, finding excuses lah.

Keeping healthy is difficult, here’s an App to help you.

Rush, rush, rush. In our daily lives, we are always rushing to complete tasks, from work to study to running daily nitty gritties and affairs.

Time is the essence of all things but yet it is tough to ensure that we sometimes overlook taking care of ourselves before we take care of others. Just look at the necessities to handle, food has always been the concern of all. Without someone’s assistance ie Maid etc. We need to eat right? Dun get me wrong. Eat with reasonable amounts. What’s there to life? Just about food? It may seem to be most critical to our body. Can you do without food for a day? Not many seriously think of the impact that food causes to our bodies. The worst part is that we gobble down food and it is hard to resist the temptations. But that’s not the only factor. Most of us are concerned about the shape of our body but few stopped to think what has caused that to change? Through our eating habits, no, not exactly. We need to balance it with something else. Exercise. Yes. You are right. But how can we achieve all that with all the nitty gritties in life? That’s why we think of fitness apps. So now, the apps are supposed to assist us right? Hmm, but wait a minute, some apps are just so frustrating and time consuming and just give me a headache.

Perhaps it is difficult to navigate or we spend too much time thinking how to use it.

So here we come to rectify, maybe not all, but at least to relieve some burden so that users can have a peace of mind and save energy on something else.

Let’s simplify the Healthy 365 App

Let us zoom into the app to review. Not directly dive in right? Yes of course there are many steps involved before we reach the final goals just like the users.

So what do we need now? Here comes the following:

01 Introduction To The Project

What is the focus? To create a user friendly fitness health app which motivates users to exercise and redeem rewards easily plus simplify the app functions so that users will be encouraged to use the fitness health app more frequently.

Before we set out to start the discovery journey, we look into the various research methods from implementing desk research to creating surveys and questionnaires to have in depth understanding of user behaviours. We also plan to conduct user interviews so that we can hear directly from users of their user experience on the app so far. In the usability testing sessions, users can share their positive and negative experiences while using the Healthy 365 app.

Competitive Analysis

Reviewing the Competitive Analysis by comparing with other Fitness health Apps

Surely we cannot do without a direct comparison with other apps in the market right?

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Work on iOS and Android
Support various health trackers
Local merchant partnership
Monetary rewards
Government-owned

Weaknesses

Negative reviews
Used for tracking purposes only
Doesn’t cater to specific user groups

Opportunities

Personalised online classes
Encourage healthy diet
Book local facilities
Better knowledge of nearby amenities

Threats

Hesitation to exercise outdoors
Competitor apps like LumiHealth
Merged into one national health app

User Goals

After the above comparison, we start to set the goals for our user interview, we need to have the objectives to be clear.

The following is just a preview of the likely new phone screens. Relax! Even though our main task right now is to create our own prototype flow.

So we start to set some interview goals and questions to ask users.

User Interview and Survey

Interview Goals

To understand the motivation for downloading the app
To understand the user’s habits while using the app
To understand the frustrations of the users when using the app

Selection Criteria

Must have used the Healthy 365 app
Exercise frequently (more than twice a week)

Interview Questions

1. What is your idea of a healthy lifestyle?
2. What is your biggest struggle in achieving that goal?
3. What other exercise apps do you use apart from Healthy 365?
4. Have you participate in the National Steps Challenge?
5. What exercises do you participate in?
6. Do you prefer to use another app instead of Healthy 365? If so, why?

7. How often do you meet the 10,000 steps goal?

8. How do you think the app will motivate you to participate in exercise activities?

With so many questions in mind, we need to dig into what the users say about the Healthy 365 app. This is just a summary of the whole survey process.

Survey Research

Screener Survey

Out of 25 respondents, we screened out the ones who opens the Healthy 365 app and has a higher frequency of using it plus tracking their steps for exercise.

User Survey

Out of 20 respondents, we zoomed into the main reasons for downloading the Healthy 365 app, the frequency, motivation and biggest struggles to achieving 10,000 steps goal.

Insights

App motivates users to exercise more to achieve points when close to 10,000 steps.
Users want to download the app to obtain rewards and points.
Most users may not be able to clock enough steps when they are staying at home.
Improvements needed for the user interface of the the app for better user experience.

Improvements

To do in-depth research on how users use specific features within the app.
To find ways to improve the present features within the app.

Let us take a closer look at what the users are saying about the Healthy 365 app so that we can have a better solution to provide for the users. To do this, we use the affinity diagram so that we can zoom into the details much more.

Affinity Diagram

Now we take a closer look at the pain points which form the problem statements.

Pain Points and Setting Problem Statements

The next session, we start crafting user scenario and creating user persona so that we can understand user’s lifestyle and how the Healthy 365 app can be more fine tuned to the user’s needs.

User Scenario

“Jessica Lim, 35, is an office worker in an accounting firm. As she is tasked to check the extensive accounts of large firms, she often works overtime to complete her assigned tasks.
With the present pandemic situation, some workers in her team have been laid off and she now has to take on additional work. She struggles to finish the tasks due and misses out on exercise at times. Currently, Jessica exercises at least once a week and she wants to increase it to three times a week, so that she’s able to look more trim and fit.
Food wise, she tries to eat healthily but ends up snacking when completing work late at night. Recently, she also realises that sitting too much has made her gain weight.”

User Persona

Bio

Jessica is a highly organised and efficient Financial Analyst. Despite her demanding job, she strives to stay in shape and exercises at least once a week. Recently, she also realises that sitting too much has made her gain weight.

Goals

•Live a balanced and healthy life

•Want to exercise three times a week to lose weight

•Want to look trim and fit

Challenges

•Work late often and feel tired

•Snack regularly

•Can’t find time to exercise

“I am so busy working, I just want to keep track of my basic healthy stats and body conditions.”

Habits

•Eat take-out food often

•Take short naps when tired

•Go out with friends on the weekend

The following are some lifestyle apps that Jessica Lim uses

So now we can start to form some thinking patterns using the above user persona.

Empathy Journey Map

Customer Journey Map

After a closer examination of the customer journey map, we set to investigate through usability issues findings and further brainstorming and below is a summary of the 5 most severe issues.

Usability Issues Findings

Usability Heuristics

1. Too many buttons on global navigation bar

Proposed Solution: Reduce number of buttons with no scrolling

2. Features within the app are not explained well to the user

Proposed Solution: Interactive walkthrough to guide users. Help button to introduce features

3. Fail to notify users when data is not synced properly

Proposed Solution: Status bar, pop-up message or consistent icon for additional information

So now the picture starts to get clearer and clearer, we now can explore UX metrics.

UX Metrics

As we further advance on, let us now look at value proposition canvas for a summary of how we can proceed on to develop concrete solutions.

Value Proposition Canvas

UX Storyboard

Wireframing

After a series of wireframing and prototyping, we come up with our own proposed colour style guide and UI design.

Style Guide

We first come up with suggested mobile screens based on the style guide and colour scheme chosen and possible prototyping.

UI Design

Then we set up possible scenarios where users will use Healthy 365 app for.

Use Case One: Exercise

Modify the reward system

Use Case Two: Rewards

Prototyping

After coming up with prototyped mobile screens, I come up with possible AB testing solutions as following.

AB Testing

Key Learnings:

1. Providing solutions using research analysis for identified problems according to user feedback. Iterate again to discover further issues.
2. Think on my own feet with response to contributing ideas during brainstorming, test it out and implement after discovery.
3. There can be various options and methods for one single app and no limited boundaries to the ideas. Whatever we set out to do, we have to verify by testing and reconfirming by research data and user responses after the changes are implemented and go live in the final app.