Family Health & Activity App Concept

In this project I was facing a couple of challenges, which, to me, makes for an interesting UX project. These challenges were namely that we were dealing with an organization, which wanted to establish a digital identity beyond their pre existing website, the existing users of the organization’s services were largely strangers to the organization, and the organization had no development resources beyond their CTO who was our point of contact.

After the initial project meeting to kickoff the project it seemed like our client and other stakeholders were rather keen on finding a concept which helped them reach their users outside of the organization’s physical spaces. Moreover, this organization’s focus on exercise, physical health and mental well-being, necessitated that the concept should have a focus to deal with some of the issues a report had identified amongst youth and adolescents. The issues our client had identified as being most important for them to do something about was an alarmingly increasing rate of obesity and deteriorating mental health amongst children in the ages 3-14.

I see the challenges of the projects as being a must to overcome in order to make any headway towards any of the project goals. The project goals have more to do with what the client was getting from the work I, along with my project team, was doing for them.

User Research

After my initial user research planning brainstorm, I met up with my project team to discuss each of our considerations and settle on a strategy to carry out our research. We settled on a strategy of conducting in situ 5 minute guerilla interviews to gauge the initial feedback. Afterwards we wanted to recruit users for longer semi structured interviews in a more controlled setting to get more detailed user insights about what challenges they were facing regarding their physical and mental well-being. Given the problem we were trying to deal with we also decided that we needed to talk to both parents and their children. As our assumption was that the most impactful factors in children and adolescent physical and mental well-being was the primary and secondary types of socialization. And of these 2 socialization types we assumed that it would be more feasible to affect family situations rather than impacting aspects in the secondary socialization in a controlled manner.

Thus began the guerilla interviews. It was my first experience doing this type of interview and with little to no guidance in the field, the yield was rather limited. Perhaps the most important insight was that this method was not right for what we wanted to achieve. Hence we pivoted away from these and began preparing the setup for longer form semi structured interviews. 

Until this pivot we hadn’t considered which people we wanted to talk to as we wanted the initial feedback to work off of. Given the situation and the fact that we needed feedback from both children and parents, we started to set up family interviews with one parent and 1 or more of their children. The idea was to get a better understanding of what the parents do, their intentions, how that is perceived by the children, and what kind of social and physical activities both parent and child engage in already.

Recruiting for these interviews was done through the project team member’s own network as a compromise due to the issues with doing guerilla interviews. Part of our initial strategy was to recruit users for longer interviews through the guerilla interviews. The result of this compromise was that we interviewed people from families living further away from the client organization’s physical spaces than we ideally wanted. However all of the people we recruited were users of the client organization or had been previously. An additional thing we decided upon was to focus on families with children in the age span from 10-14 due to the scope of this initial phase of what was hoped to be a long lasting partnership.

These ‘family’ interviews yielded a great deal of insight about the different kinds of situations that happen in a family both due to the parent’s busy everyday lives but moreover the adolescent’s lives were more busy than anticipated. This became an insight that would help inform the design of the concept as it made little sense to design anything for adolescents in their school days as these were consumed by school, homework, and other scheduled activities. Which is why we decided to focus on providing value, for families with 10-14 year olds, during the weekends.

We set up a team meeting after conducting interviews and reading each of the interview participating team member’s notes to discuss our insights and experiences that might not have come across through our notes. The collective impression was that no parent or child lacked the intention to do something good for themselves. But when they are tired after a long work/school day or week, they usually tend to take the path of least resistance and do what feels the easiest to do. Another challenge was to think of something to do which was engaging, fun, and provided some sort of health benefit, whilst being tired. Lastly we noted that the children in these families also wanted a say in what they, as a family, was going to do.

Insights

Concept

Our client and his closest colleague were both interested in being part of the project and especially the design process. In order to include them I helped set up a condensed design sprint. In this set up we presented the user insights and feedback we had received through the user research, I prepared a selection of other solutions that I believed could inspire the other team members to ideate the best possible solution sketch. In total we had 2 designated days with our key stakeholders and other team members to get a common understanding of the user’s feedback, get a common idea of what is in the market already, and which solutions are doing interesting things with their design, which we could draw inspiration from. Lastly we needed to sketch our individual ideas and settle on which ideas we wanted to bring with us in designing a high fidelity and high resolution prototype of the concept.

Condensed Design Sprint

On the first day after presenting the user research results, I presented the different solutions that we could draw inspiration from. I focused on finding solutions operating in the same space regarding health and exercise. As well as finding solutions that provided a good and playful user experience through design. Some of the solutions I wanted the team to draw inspiration from were Strava with the segment leaderboards allowing users to compete asynchronously, Headspace with the daily mindfulness routine, and Tivoli with the way they are trying to tie their digital presence together with their physical spaces. The sketches definitely had some variance but mostly we saw similarities which greatly helped us align on a direction for what ideas we wanted to explore on the second day.

On the second day we created more detailed sketches through two exercises which took up most of the morning.These two pen and paper exercises produced tangible artifacts with detailed concepts and some rather explorative ideas. After lunch we took turns presenting our ideas and rationale behind these and then we used dot-voting to pin down the exact concept we should make a high fidelity and high resolution prototype of.

Usually a full design sprint would take 5 days and include user research through expert interviews on the day before presenting feedback and after sketching and settling on a concept you would have the project team create a testable prototype of the concept which they would test on the last day. Given the scope of this particular project the end goal was to provide our client with an interactable prototype he could use to present the concept to his board of directors and get additional budget allocated to the project

User Interface Design

The concept we ended up with was to create an app which would utilize elements such as Headspace’s daily routine, curated activity ideas based on the user’s input including activities to do at home or at the client organization’s location, and a family hub to allow for all users in a hub to have agency. The daily routine and curation of activities should help lower the user’s perceived barriers to making the healthy choice. The activities themselves would primarily be for the weekends and was meant to be healthy whilst providing a balance of exercise and relaxation through curation.

Creating the user interface was not too difficult as the client organization had a design guide created by their marketing department and thus font and color choice were already made for us. This allowed us to focus on creating user interface elements instead and make these visually pleasing with images, effects and semi transparent color gradients on top of activity images. I, along with three other team members created the user interface in Figma. A part of the process was to explore playful user interfaces to encourage users to use the solution and engage users further when using it. Some of the interfaces we looked at were Headspace’s use of characters and UX writing and the Apple watch app selection screen. We settled on a conventional user interface elements for this prototype as the Apple watch user interface was ill-suited for a smartphone and the playful elements required more time to make versus making a conventional visually pleasing prototype. And the purpose of this particular prototype was to get more budget allocated for the project which would allow us to spend more time making the application playful.

I, along with two of my colleagues only had two weeks to create a high fidelity and visually pleasing prototype. This meant the design process was more of a scramble than a structured and considered process. We settled on a lean design system and naturally used the style guide provided to us through the client organization. The design system included 3 different button variants, each with 3 states, 3 different cards with 2 different states each, and a layout. Additionally we had a main navigation menu and we imported an icon library to operate as efficiently as possible.

This project was a success in the sense that we impressed our client and he was expressively excited about the workflow, design process, and the final prototype. From my own perspective I was excited to do the user research and establish familiarity with new methods in spite of one of them being quite uncomfortable to conduct. I was also happy to utilize some of my knowledge about playful design to inspire and inform my team members and the fact that I got to exercise one of my passions with UX design.

Unfortunately the partnership couldn’t continue due to the european energy crisis eating up what would have been our budget for the entirety of 2023.