Case Study: Not Just Another Mental Health App
Our client was the National Wellness Institute, an organization that focuses on coaching and training of wellness professionals. However, the institute lacks digital tools and the number of members is decresing. The NWI’s brief set the goal for us to:
- Create a set of digital wellness tools, and
- Upate the NWI’s Image by creating a new visual system, that reflects their innovative and refreshed approach to wellness.
Following the Design Thinking Methodology, my team-member and I first set up a time schedule for the upcoming two weeks. Starting with the Emphasize Stage and collecting data through user research, we set up a survey, did research on our client and defined their scope and brand.
Our Quantitative Research results showed that the most pressing issues, when it comes to wellness and well-being, were rising due to the pandemic. Our respondents mentioned, that they missed a feeling of balance and calmness, they mentioned that they tried to incorporate new habits into their daily life that work with the lockdown situation — however, they struggled with keeping them up as they lack motivation. We then asked ourselves:
How might we motivate people to improve on their mental health?
How might we provide tracking options for mental health regards?
How might we remind and motivate people to reflect on their day regularely?
We conducted Qualitative Research by interviewing a wellness professional who was coaching workout and mental health practices. She gave us some more insights on user’s habit behavior and their needs when it comes to well-being. These results and our Market Comparison helped defining our scope even better and to set our focus on creating a Habit Tracking App!
After filling in our Affinity Diagram, Empathy Map and the Lean UX Canvas, we had a clear overview of our target group, as well as their wants and needs. We then came up with our User Persona, defined their individual User Journey on incorporating a new habit and phrased their User Stories.
One of our User Stories: “As a young student, I want to know how to set my own goals and define what habits i need to incorporate, so that I understand what I am working towards and why.”
We started Ideating using the Crazy 8 Method, explained our ideas to each other, voted on the most thrilling ideas and came up with three main features for our habit tracker.The main features to implement were: An achievements and rewards overview, a personal diary to track your experiences AND the community feature that helps exchanging ideas and keep the motivation levels high.
With a clear understanding of our ideas, we started Low Fi’s tested them and turned the results into Mid Fi’s. We compiled the Problem & Hypothesis Statement.
As the first week ended, we had our Mid Fidelity User-Flows put together and used Maze to collect user feedback over the weekend.
The feedback we got was mixed — respondents mentioned they find the flow very easy, however they didnt unterstand the motivation to go through the process. We got a long review and feedback session from our teacher and started rethinking. Came up with a couple of ideas and with a fresh and modern design, the whole thing started feeling elevated and more accessible. We decided to get rid of the whole „setting and editing a habit“ flow and instead, focus on a flow that’s covering on our main ideas more. Using the Jobs To Be Done Methodology, it was a lot easier do define our path, which is bringing like-minded communities together.
One of our Jobs to be done: “When I feel unmotivated at times I want to get in touch with people who feel similar, so I can learn from their experiences and share mine.”
Next we started with a Moodboard, set our Color Scheme, Brand Attributes and voted on the matching font that would make us lucky.
We searched for Graphics, Icons and Illustrations that match our color scheme. We created Components, Variants and improved our Design System. We used Grids to adjust to Alignments and sizing of each phone size.
Late at night I found my team partner and I in our shared Figma file communicating via small text boxes. I spent an hour Organizing, Naming and Decluttering our files and components. Most importantly, using Auto-Layout to make our Designs Responsive to different sizes. With a little bit of practice, if found myself loving constraints, auto-layout and resizing.
Off to new challenges and a lot of work to come, we ended the second day of the second week. We planned to finish our High Fidelity User Flow and run User Tests.
Wednesday we finally decided on our illustrations set, we adjusted the color scheme and organized the files further. I helped my team member with Figma and we spent some time discussing the pros and cons of background colors in contrast to monochrome buttons and Vice Verca.
In the end of the day my frames were perfectly responsive but needed some fine tuning with the UI. I was happy that I could help my team mate with her Auto-Layout and Constraints. On the other hand I got help from her with UI questions I had.
A small demonstration of Responsive Design.
The last day was crazy, long and intense. We did some more fine-tuning, fought with auto-layout and made some last-minute touches. Then we Prototyped the whole Flow, worked with Auto-Animation, Hovering and Overlay Functions. We created a Presentation Design, worked our design thinking process into a Storytelling Flow and finished our slides.
As a last step we translated our iOS user flow into an additional Android prototype, where the responsive design came in handy again. We finished our presentation on Friday and got amazing feedback from our group, some even mentioned it was their favorite flow ❤. Our main takeaways from two weeks of intense project work were that teamwork always wins — helping eachother out will always improve your own skills - and a good plan for your design system and material design is the non plus ultra.
Thank you for reading my case study and feel free to get in touch!
Henriette Who
