UX Case Study: Vita — Fun for future health
This is a UX case study for Project 3 of the User Experience Design Immersive program at General Assembly Melbourne.
Vita — Who are they?
Vita’s aim is to inspire and enable people to live free of chronic disease by introducing a plant-based diet program to users through the use of behavioural science and human-centred design.
Why do they need our help?
- Currently only offer the product face to face, which doesn’t scale
- A way to scale online — Vita wants 100m users by 2023
- Target market is everyone — but you need an initial target market to start with!
What do we want to find out, and how?
- How people form habits (Interviews and Secondary Research)
- How people think about food and health (Interviews, Surveys & Secondary Research)
- The current market and Vita’s competitors (Secondary Research)
Team and Timeline
My role was project manager, however I contributed to each stage of the process from start to finish. This is what the rest of the team were up to:
- Depheney K (Visual Design Lead)
- Oliver W (Prototype Lead)
- Norman R (Research Lead)
Time constraints? We had a total of two weeks to prepare and deliver a proposal to Vita stakeholders.
Our Process
We followed the double diamond process as we wanted every design decision to be backed up by a tested and trusted UX methodology.
So, let’s get into it…
Coronary Heart Disease — Australia’s Number 1 Killer.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the top cause of death in Australia is Coronary Heart Disease. In fact, it was one of the top killers in every group, age 25 to 95+.
So, after digesting the hard facts about the devastating impact that poor lifestyle choices can have on our lives, we knew we had to dive deeper into habit formation, people’s thoughts on health and food, and existing trends & products in the market.
Global App Market Research
According to ComScore ‘Apps you can’t go without’, 96% of time is split between 10 apps — mostly around shopping, communicating or watching/reading content online — if you look carefully, everyone one of the top apps has a little ping of dopamine associated with them to get you back for a bargain, a new webpage or video or message from a friend…
To better understand the what opportunity there was in the health and fitness app sector, we decided to see what the current market had to offer
The Competition
Health & Fitness apps take up 3% of the app market. There are a range of competing apps designed to address health and fitness, mindfulness and habit creation.
Leading Apps: Fitbit and MyFitnessPal
We needed more insight into what makes these apps so successful and why users were buying into them.
What are Fitbit doing differently?
- Fitbit uses challenges to transform fitness into a game, motivating users to compete and invite their friends to join.
- Fitbit partnered with their users and Feeding America to donate 1.5 million meals for the needy, generating lots of hype for the brand.
- Fitbit automatically posts your achievements on social media, keeping their brand constantly top-of-mind.
Key features of Fitbit that we can learn from are gamification, fun and social good.
What about MyFitnessPal?
‘Start with an easy win and celebrate the small gains’
- MyFitnessPal taps into habit building through small celebrated steps towards healthy living. They want to give their users permission to really enjoy their food by showing them exactly what they were putting into their bodies.
ComScore statistics show that it is common for apps to have 71% churn in 90 days, meaning users need a reason to come back (social, fun, small rewards).
It became evident that habit formation was a common driver amongst these two leading apps, so we wanted a closer look…
Diving deeper: The Science Behind Habit
The Habit Loop
This loosely started as 21days by Dr Maltz in a self-help book and exploded into hundreds of authors and scholars, Charles Duhigg, James Clear amongst others are focused on Cue — Routine — Reward…and repeat.
Keep it simple!
Forming a healthy habit is no walk in park — particularly when it is far from what you’re used to. Our levels of motivation respond best to changes that can be easily integrated into our everyday routine without too much effort.
So, how might we tie this into our solution?
To give us a bit more insight into habits, we decided to look at the key motivators behind more addictive habit forming which lead us to…
Gambling Games: Lights, Music & Spinning Colours
Though it looks like a bit of a scam, you wanted to click that ‘start’ button, didn’t you?
Poker Machines and wheels of fortune are objectively a terrible bet (even amongst gambling), yet they are notoriously addictive — why?
Studies suggest that these lights, spinning motions and even sounds become more attractive and capable of triggering urges to play when they are paired with reward uncertainty.
The main reason people play games is… dopamine. Dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter and plays a significant role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behaviour, but more on this later…
Getting stuck into Primary Research
Our leading questions were around what health, diets and food actually meant to our users and what their main motivations and habits were.
Key interview insights
While it took time, team voting and funnel methods to break down this data, we were able to narrow it down to three key points:
- Diets are restrictive, unbalanced, and too hard stick to
- I assess my health based on how I physically feel
- I need a trigger to initiate change
As we continued to synthesise, three mindsets began to emerge
Sam — Sam’s the sort of person that is social, enjoys food with friends, treats it like an experience to be enjoyed. They crave variety and listen to how their body feels following a change in diet.
Alex — Alex is young, carefree, and doesn’t see the need to act now for a healthier future.
Leslie — Leslie is managing current health issues and relies heavily on advice from their GP.
Why is Sam our primary focus?
Through further synthesis we discovered that our Sam mindset represented the highest percentage of our user population. So by circling back to Vita’s business goals, and listening to the predominant voice in our interviews — Sam emerged as our primary focus.
So, let’s take a closer look at Sam. Sam knows how to diet, has done it successfully to achieve a goal before, but then went back to old habits because it didn’t meet their expectations of what a sustainable change could be.
To better understand Sam’s pain points, we produced a retrospective journey map which made it clear that it wasn’t starting a diet that Sam struggled with, it was the lack of variety and freedom that was preventing them from sticking to a healthy diet change
Recap: Sam’s key pain points
- Constantly felt like they were ‘missing out’ from the things they enjoy
- Restrictions resulted in a lack of motivation to stick to these changes
After identifying Sam’s key pain points, our problem became clear
From problem to solution
We took our ‘how might we’ statement to the sketch pad to generate ideas towards a solution for Sam, kicking off our ideation with a time-boxed Crazy 8 session. We chose this method as it’s a highly collaborative exercise that we were able to do remotely.
Choosing A Solution
We found ourselves with multiple ideas, so how did we choose one? We took a vote which then left us with 3 ideas: A roadmap with prizes, A biological age generator, and a meal wheel. From here we went back to Sam — what was going to help them add flexibility and variety? Which of these solutions will allow us to best integrate our habit formation research?
Our Solution — The Vita Wheel
This is an app for plant-based recipes, where users spin the wheel for a meal. If the user decides to cook the suggested recipe, they can add it to their streak. Users can save the recipes they like for future use, building their healthy repertoire over time. Recipes are tailored to the users as time passes.
But how does it solve Sam’s problem?
Sam thinks that diets are too restrictive, so the vita wheel offers flexibility (food preference swipe and the ability to choose a new recipe) - reducing the chance of boredom and feeling like they have limited options. The wheel and streak features aim to gamify the way Sam eats, helping them build healthier long term habits.
A task flow then helped us visualise Sam’s path, as well as further clarifying how our app would work, step by step.
Time to put it to the test
Main feedback from our initial paper prototype testing included:
> Removing the ‘spin the wheel’ button — people wanted to spin it themselves
> “But how will the app know what food I like?”
> “Streaks should be more visual rather than a static number”
Mid Fidelity Wireframes to Prototypes
Further iteration took place to add spinning capabilities and a food preference swipe screen to cater for our users needs.
Higher Fidelity
While we didn’t get enough time to test this design, we were able to iterate on the last point of feedback - making the streak count more visual to reinforce the fun nature of the app.
Give it a spin yourself here.
Hypothesis
We believe that by offering the Vita Wheel feature to customers like Sam, it will help them make eating healthier fun and stickable, and ultimately reduce chronic disease in the long term.
We will know this to be true when Sam sticks to her new diet for longer than 90days (forming a new habit), and feels that a diet is no longer about restrictions. Sam will benefit from the power of tiny gains, one broccoli at a time!
We will also know this to be true when we see rapid growth in VitaWheel users from launch to 2023 and subsequently a reduction in the incidence rates of chronic disease as published by the ABS.
How will we penetrate Vita into the health app market?
- Launch acquisition phase by leveraging the partnership with the Australian Institute of Health and Wellness
- Socials for activation
- App store optimisation for retention
- Diligent investment in adwords (‘plant-based’ was the #1 recipe search trend in 2019)
Where to from here?
Much like Sam’s journey to healthy eating, we want Vita to focus on small steps towards success.
Firstly, we’d scale with our Leslie mindset and work on solving their biggest value problem, which could include exploring the management of current health issues and the prevention of future ones.
Next, we’d work on our secondary mindset — how are we going to make the Alex mindsets of the world kick into gear and act now? What would those initial triggers look like?
And lastly, a whole lot more testing and iteration.
Personal learnings
Feature Creep! — accepting that we were beginning to stray too far from our problem with unnecessary features and screens and working back from there was a critical takeaway from this project.
Sam was the real hero here. For me, this project has reiterated just how important personas and mindsets are in building a compelling narrative and staying focused on the problem at hand.
Lastly, respect the double diamond process. This is something I’m continuing to learn and reflect on as I progress as a UX designer.
Thank you for reading.
