Case study: Healthy Workday
Introduction
This case study summarizes the results of a two week long design project in collaboration with Esra Luijken as part of the Ironhack UX/UI Bootcamp. The goal of this project was to create a minimal viable product using the classic design thinking process; emphasize, define, ideate, prototype and test. The first week was centered around user experience, the second dedicated to design and prototyping.
Brief
The world has been turned upside down due to Covid-19. As a result, millions of people work from home or in semi-empty offices. The National Wellness Institute has challenged us to understand people’s relationship with mental, physical, and emotional well-being and to develop a tool that will help them to stay healthy in these tough times.
Research
Before defining the problem statement it was necessary to get a broader understanding of people’s mental, physical, and emotional well-being while working from home. In a survey we asked people about several behaviors or “actions” that could positively influence their well-being while working from home. This is what we found out:
43% of the respondents experience working from home as bad or very bad; 82% of the respondents don’t have enough social interaction and;
71% of the respondents don’t go outside enough.
Furthermore, numerous respondents mentioned they experience pain from not exercising enough and sitting behind a desk all day. They noted that lack of motivation was their biggest hold back.
After our survey we held a few in depth interviews to get more insights into the motivation (or lack thereof) of people when it comes down to upholding healthy behavior while working from home. The respondents told us they felt confronted by our survey questions and some of them started, since filling in the survey, tracking their healthy behavior on paper.
Some of the respondents started tracking their behavior on paper.
We knew that this was essential to our research and wanted to create a digital support system to help track and stimulate healthy behavior.
Define — problem statement
We spent some time coming up with all the possible ‘how might we’s’ for this project and selected one main problem we wanted to focus on.
How might we create a digital product that helps people stay healthy during the workday?
The ‘job to be done’ for our user related to this problem is:
When I work, I need to be motivated to stay mentally and physically healthy.
User Persona
We created an affinity diagram, an empathy map and a user persona. Mike (30) lives in Amsterdam and works from home. Working from home has led to him missing his bike rides to work and the walks to the coffee machine. Due to the lack of movement he has received neck and back pains and his weight has increased. Furthermore, what he misses when working from home is the social contact with colleagues during the breaks. Since he started working from home, he also feels lonely and bored. He knows his lifestyle isn’t healthy but he needs motivation to change it. His work has indicated that he will continue to work from home in the future, so it’s time to adjust his routines.
Competitor analysis
We examined other apps in the market that focus on mental and/or physical health at work. We found out that there are already a lot of apps that help you with doing exercises during the workday. Often they are apps with a single purpose. Such as to go outside and walk, take breaks or do a small exercise. We found that there is a ‘white space’ in the multiple topic / motivational corner of the market.
Ideate
We started ideating using the crazy 8 method. After this fun exercise we continued brainstorming on the solution and finally created a storyboard. During the ideate process we came up with the idea of the tracker, the challenge wheel and a place where you can see your weekly and monthly progress and stats. When spinning the wheel the user will receive a random challenge. We tested the flow (including the challenge wheel) early on in the process and discovered that users were excited to use it.
“I want to do something about my physical and mental health, this will make it more enjoyable, and thus could help me create a new healthy habit” — Bernard
“Everyday feels the same, this product can motivate me to actually do something and change it” — Morris
Prototyping
After the first user test we found out that many people were excited to use our motivational tracker. However, there was still some work to be done. Based on the feedback and test results we decided to create an onboarding flow to introduce our product to new users. During the onboarding users can set up their goals in different categories. After incorporating the onboarding and some other new features we tested the flow again and moved on to the mid-fi.
For this project we designed a low, mid and high fidelity prototype. With each iteration we tested the results with the user. We used both heat maps and qualitative feedback in the form of interviews. We want to give a couple examples of the feedback we received and the improvements we made while prototyping.
On the home screen we:
- made the button that links to the challenge wheel bigger;
- made the wheel clickable;
- moved the tracker to the homepage instead of on a separate screen.
On the category selection screen we:
- made the clickable area and the space between the categories wider;
- removed the checkbox on the categories;
- changed to colors of the category buttons.
Design
After ideating and testing the user flows in the low- and mid fidelity prototype, we created the brand and styling of the app. Our product will be used during short beaks, to relax and at the same time as an energizer. We thus wanted to create a playful and energetic look and feel. First we made a visual competitor analysis and then created four moodboards. We tested the moodboards and the users chose for the one with deep blue and purple colors. This style gave them the most relaxing, yet motivating mood.
Design System
We made a design system with the typography, colors, icons, buttons, components, cards grids and spacing. Working with styles and variants enabled us to work fast and efficiently, it also made iterations of our product easy.
Final result (video)
To promote our final project we also coded and published a landing page (mock-up). This page is intended for potential user to find out more about Healthy Workday and download the app.
Learnings
- Great and unexpected insights can be acquired through user interviews.
- User testing is a crucial part of the process to make your product better.
- Working with components and variants makes working fast and efficient.
