Starting your health journey and keeping motivated can be a bumpy road to handle by yourself. During a 4-week design sprint, I designed a health habit-tracking app for iOS and Apple Watch making your personal health and wellness rituals something you want to do every day. The ‘Ritualist’ app helps create a simple and delightful way to build and maintain habits.
Typically, health and wellness is an area in people's lives that is hard to crack the code of consistency and daily progress. Users want to be in the best physical and mental shape but need guidance to build and maintain their habits to reach their health goals.
The Audience
Users are typically either male or females between 18-35 years old. They tend to be young professionals or college students with busy schedules.
The Solution
MVP The final product is a prototype of a mobile app that has some apple watch functionalities. It creates accountability for folks who are wanting a healthy lifestyle and makes their experience enjoyable as they build out rituals for their daily health routines.
Let’s confirm that the solution did that by walking through the process to the final product in the next section.
Process
Discover/Research
The following insights have driven the design of the Health habit tracking app.
Users are confirmed to be mostly young professionals between 18-35 and a slight majority are men although it could be argued that female influence are just as important
Health Conscious Millennials and Older Gen Z’ers are looking to gain consistency, motivation, energy and reduce the presence anxiety/depression in their lifes.
About half of the survey respondents noted they do not work out as much as they’d like to.
Competitive Analysis
Simultaneously, I performed a competitive analysis on key competitors. Here is some high level insights of a few that helped make decisions on what my apps UI could and should include and what to stay away from in order to satisfy my user’s needs and goals.
She’s driven by reducing family inherent disease like high blood pressure and asma. Enjoys to be social and keeps a tight schedule of her daily to-do.
Frustrations
She finds it hard to keep up with so many apps and wants a one-stop shop to learn how to build healthy habits, track and get the satisfaction of crossing out something from a list. She also dislikes the gatekeeping of information in the health and wellness industry and hopes to learn from the app to share it with her community.
The main five flows show how the user will get through a few key goals they might have. These include the onboarding flow, integrating other health & fitness apps, habit building, goal setting, daily check-ins. View these to get a visual map to fulfill users main goals in using the app.
I believe that iterating on the design in the early stages is necessary. Using crazy 8s and sketching out different concepts with some visual inspiration from great apps currently in the same market segment such as Headspace, Apple Health app and smaller companies such as Tangerine and Manatee.
Wireframes
The following screens were designed with the user's goal in mind. Making the flow throughout simple and intuitive was the key here. If users are to integrate this product as part of their routine then it must also provide some motivation to interact with each screen presented.
Brand Personality Taking action on the notion that users are lacking motivation and could use something that is really engaging in order to want to continue to use the app daily. The goal is for the visual design to drive users to action. In this case to get more active, eat well and stay on track to a healthy lifestyle.
Moodboard This communicates the mood of health and wellness with a modern spin to keep the main demographic of millennials and gen z engaged.
Logo Sketches
Logo
Style Guide: Color Palette, Typography
Keeping in mind the look and feel of a health tracking app and also being an innovative and transformative experience for users there had to be a decision made. That was to be ok with pushing the boundaries of a traditional health app that seems to be outdated for this generation. Color psychology: Light blue - (Primary Color) Represents the Health & wellness as many hospitals use this color to provide a sense of calm and reassurance that they are being taken good care of. Muted Black & White - A modern classic combo that keeps the text and info easy to grasp and glance at (especially on Apple watch) Coral (Red) - Activity Yellow /Light Yellow - Energetic, happiness, boosts dopamine and seraphines.
Typography Modern Bubble-rounded corners, modern, accessible
Style Guide Shows the full range of the color palette, logo, typography, its usage, and overall style of the app as a motivating energetic and minimalist approach.
prototype
Cickable lo-fi prototype below. Check out the final prototype of the Ritual mobile app. The UI is built to be intuitive, energetic and intentional in the approach to health habit building and maintaining goals.
Maze Remote User Testing Results I used Maze's platform to conduct usability testing virtually. This was helpful in gathering qualitative and quantitative data. Additionally, I took more feedback by following up with some guerilla testing in person to get more detailed feedback shared with me within the timeframe of the project. I tested 3 main components to ensure the app is keep to users mental models: 1. Is the UI intuitive to understand its use 2. Motivation (where they able to complete with delight) 3. Clarity of content hierarchy
Feedback from testers:
We got some great feedback and helped us move forward with the design and adjust to make the prototype even better. "I love the branding! It's so colorful and I love the pairing of blue and orange. Makes me feel energized! I do wonder if the onboarding could be shortened a little bit. Does the user need to upload a photo since it's more of a personal app, not social? Other than that, everything looks great!"
"Screens look nice but it feels like certain elements shift screen to screen. For a smart goal it was unclear if I needed to fill in info for more than one tab and if there was some "done" button I was supposed to be pressing. I wasn't super clear what determines what different goal categories are on the main page."
Next Steps:
1. Reimagine the SMART Goals feature content layout 2. Ensure flows are up to user understanding of how to use the app 3. Build out the Daily check-in further to have an evening reflection and week at a glance analysis 4. Build out Badges and exercise & nutrition blog to continue to learn aspects of building great daily health & wellness rituals. 5. Better categorization of type of habits in the log.Calendar views ( Daily, weekly, and Monthly views of goals and habits log)
conclusion
Final Thoughts
The inspiration for this project was my friends and I's extreme dissatisfaction with our experience navigating getting older and trying to balance a healthy lifestyle. We would start off with so much motivation and good intentions yet with little to show 3 months from our start date. The truth of the matter is that we were thinking about our health all wrong. The issue wasn’t motivation or lack thereof, it was the lack of proper planning and commitment. So now the question has grown from ‘How do we get people to want to use a health tracking app?’ to ‘How might we reimagine the whole experience of building healthy habits?’ Not as a quick-fix solution but as a daily commitment to getting 1% better. There are no shortcuts, but a ‘Ritualist’ is cool with that and makes it enjoyable regardless of the time commitment. Throughout the discovery/research phase, my assumption was that people would need help tracking their habits (which is still true), however, the true need for this set of users tested was actually guidance on building habits and keeping up with these habits daily. An overwhelming 35% found consistency and 23% found anxiety and depression being their hindrance to living a healthy lifestyle. This is where the idea of habit building and goal setting has been confirmed to be the solution to these pain points. Once a habit is created in the app you must have it connected to a goal so that they are in sync and will update you periodically to ensure you are keeping up with the pace you set for yourself. Taking into account various user interview feedback and survey results, the biggest frustration around building healthy habits is the lack of consistency. The Ritualist app provides a start but by any means will not solve personal commitment issues. If by chance the user will only be engaging through their Apple Watch, they can opt-in to a daily check-in which entails gauging their mood and reflecting on curated prompts to get a better understanding of their mood for the day and give you a bit of mental clarity. With that being the first task of the day you are already 1% healthier than before. Making it that much easier to tackle the harder tasks such as working out or meal prepping. This idea is called habit stacking which was learned from Atomic Habits by James Clear. The concept is that one small task can lead to you completing a slightly harder task and then another soon after. These all relate to accomplishing a goal in small chunks over a longer period rather than a one-and-done approach which is not sustainable. Overall, I believe that this is only scratching the surface of all that I’d like to see in the health and wellness industry. To start, I believe that information can and should be accessible and easily digestible for people of diverse backgrounds in the US. Learning about your personal health and wellness shouldn't be gate-kept for medical practitioners but should be available for everyone. In conclusion, more apps like this in the market will democratize access to credible health and habit-building information for all. Not just for those who can afford to have a life coach and dietician at their disposal.
