Feature Improvements for the iOS Health App
UX Case study: iOS App Re-design
Brief
To propose feature improvements to the existing iOS Health App
Time taken : 3 days
Goal
To come up with an end to end product design solution to increase in the Daily Active Users on the platform
Design process followed
Discover
- Step 1 Identify the design challenge: I did not have any existing data about user behavior on the iOS health app. Hence, I started by researching the user types & doing usability tests of the current app experience. I asked 5 users to use the app and observed where the users are getting stuck at, what is working & what could be better.
- Step 2 Conduct a Market study (identify things that work/do not work for competitor products): I studied the experience of 10 products in the health sector. I used them as free prototypes for the user study I conducted.
- Step 3 User research: I read some blogs online to get a better idea as to user behavior & to observe the interaction patterns that are preferred. I also rolled out a quick survey on google forms to get a preliminary understanding of the user behavior & motivations behind using a health app. From the above steps, I noted down behavior identifiers, key game-changers, user needs & pain points.
Define
- Step 4 The Hypothesis: From learnings in the above steps, I formulated hypotheses & identified possible opportunities that would make the experience better for the users, to test out in the user study in the next step. Ideally, at this stage, I would have spoken to product & engineering leads about effort estimation & priority of execution of these ideas.
Design
- Step 5 Ideation: Based on hypothesis & opportunities, I started with paper-mocks & quick iterations in black & white on Figma. I asked for early feedback from a few people around me & made more changes. Finally made hi-fidelity design solution & prototype
Validate
- Step 6 Usability testing: I tested out my prototype with 5 participants and identify areas of improvement.
- Step 7 Way forward: The way forward is to test with more people and keep iterating!
Step 1: Identifying the design challenge
Ways to increase DAU
- Increase engagement in existing users
- Explore areas of opportunity to onboard new users
What makes the iOS Health app different?
I started by reading up online about apps that deal with the five main health functions: activity, mindfulness, sleep, nutrition & medical help. The iOS Health app itself acts as a one-stop data aggregation platform for all five categories. It aggregates data from the Apple Watch, iPhone movements/interactions, and third-party apps. A few blogs helped me better understand how to utilise the app to its fullest potential.
Who are our users?
“Individuals more likely to use health apps tended to be younger, have higher incomes, be more educated”
- Health App Use Among Mobile Phone Owners: A Survey by Paul Krebs
More blogs like the one quoted above helped me find data as to who our users are and their motivations behind using a health app. This helped me recruit users better for research & testing. It also gave me more ideas about general user behavior, new opportunity areas, and quantitative data to back it up.
What about health help outside the mobile app universe?
I realized that there is one more aspect that plays an important role in designing a useful Health app. The steps user takes outside of the current mobile universe for their health. These could be new areas of opportunities as well to onboard new users.
Areas of opportunity
- The most important factor for steady health improvement is consistency in exercise and diet routines. How does the user keep informed and motivated currently? How do they form lasting good healthy habits? Can the app help with this?
- How does the user currently stay on track with his diet and exercise routines? Do they consult a diet plan/dietician? Can the app help them with their meal prep plan or make one for them?
- Does the user want to consult a doctor for an ailment or a therapist for their mental health? Can this be made accessible through the app?
- Does the user take lab tests to keep a check of their nutrition deficiencies / keeping track of any chronic illnesses like thyroid/asthma etc?
- How can logging data of the user’s daily & long-term medical, fitness history and reminders like eg. taking multivitamins/reminder to take asthma inhaler/insulin injections / regular temperature and blood pressure checks / recording menstrual cycles/recording exercises, etc be made easier and consistent?
- Is the data currently recorded accurately? Does the app validate this anywhere without user prompts? eg. sleep cycles are often logged wrong because users don’t take the time to correct them and can often give wrong feedback on the person’s overall health
- Do community activities for health motivate the user more? Eg. Group exercise or therapy sessions? Drawing inspiration from social media influencers in fitness or being a part of a community that inspires health and wellness, especially seeking community motivation during the lockdown, etc. Will introducing the social angle onboard new users and keep existing ones more engaged?
Learnings
- Fitness and nutrition were the most common motivations, with most respondents using them at least daily.
- Trust in their accuracy and data safety was quite high, and most felt that the apps had improved their health. Hence, retention could be made high by maintaining this trust.
- About half of the app users (45.7%) had stopped using some health apps, primarily due to high data entry burden, loss of interest, and hidden costs. Easy, intuitive flows with less cognitive load of data-entry should help in retention as well.
- For health care systems, significant interest exists among users for communicating with doctors and using apps to seek health-care related services. This could be an opportunity area to onboard new kinds of users.
Step 2: Market study
I decided to test a few hypotheses from my primary research through Quantitative research ( Survey ) and a few through Qualitative research ( Video call User tests)
Quantitative User research ( Survey )
- I studied 10 products popular in the Health sector for competitor comparisons. These were Fitness Category (FitBit, GoogleFit, Cult ), Mental Health category (Calm, Headspace, Wysa), Period tracker (Clue, WomanLog) & Medical Help (Practo, ArogyaSetu).
- I also felt like I should validate some of my learnings & experiences through a quick survey on google forms to get a deeper understanding of user behavior. I pitted the 10 products against each other to find out about user pain points, wants & needs
- I got 14 responses from users aged 30–40 years with a split of 6 men & 8 women. You can take a look at the responses here.
Qualitative User research
I conducted qualitative research with 5 users about how they use the iOS health app, that I identified from the survey above and reached out to on video calls, while they shared their screens with me. I further spoke to them about their app experience & behavior in tracking their overall health.
Users tested
2 males & 3 females, 30–40 years, tech-savvy, health-conscious, mid-high incomes
Learnings from survey & user tests
- Most users wanted more actionables with their health data.
User Quote: “My iOS app should have more sub categories..like suggestions to keep going for an target already set.”
2. Most users thought personalised plans and regular reminders will help them be more consistent with their health
User Quote: “Suggest Excercise routines and reminder and trackers for the same “
3. Community and workout groups are highly inspiring to users
User Quote: “Looking at other women losing weight.. motivates me.. if they can even I can.”
4. When asked what motivates users to stay on track, most answered that positive reinforcements and rewards always work better. Sharing these with a community feels even more rewarding.
User Quote: “When you see results of following habit”
User Quote: “Having buddies to support any fitness plan”
Step 4 The Hypothesis
Based on the learnings from the research I drew hypotheses on a few broad areas where improvements can be made to increase DAU. These were -
1 - Clear Actionables on Homepage
Currently, the app has a lot of data about the user’s health but no clear actionables as to how to use it to his advantage. Users usually thought
“What do I do with this information?”
- What are my actionables on all this data? How can I use this data to be better day-by-day?
- Can we make a plan and work towards it together? Could you be my virtual health coach?
- Can I see my progress till now and get some direction to be better every day?
2 - Rewards & Challenges
“ But how will I know if I am doing well?”
- Reminding the user of his progress till now through engaging, rewarding ways will keep the user more consistent in taking care of their health and interacting with the app daily as well.
- New activities or achievements should be rewarded with new milestones. For this, I thought of introducing new challenges and badges earned via them.
- They should be able to share their achievements with the community to help stay motivated.
3 - Constant engagement through community
“I need the right advice, at the right time to keep motivated”
- Prompts at the right time to keep me engaged for overall health benefits and get them to the app more often in a day.
- Increasing user retention by gamifying the platform i.e making health-related interactions interesting & engaging.
- More quality content, delivered at the right time.
- Ways to interact with a community and encourage each other to grow.
Step 5: Ideation
Assumption
- I have assumed that the user is familiar with iOS patterns.
- They have given permission to sync the data from their Apple watch & third party apps to iOS Health App.
- That there are no tech limitations in sourcing data or sharing data.
Paper — mocks
I sketched some variations, based on the three hypotheses mentioned above. Flow 1: Less cognitive load on the Homepage. More interactive summary and more actionables. Personalized plan building.
Flow 2: Customised plan and goal prompts
Flow 3: Reminders at the right time
Wireframes
I took feedback on the paper mock options from people around me and re-iterated the following wireframes on Figma directly.
Final Solution
- I made Hi-fidelity screens for
- Actionables & Engagement: Homepage (Journal) & Community screens
- Challenges: I have chosen to build the end-to-end flow for the “Plan Challenge” experience.
- Notifications: Prompts at the right time to increase DAU
2. I decided to largely use the same iOS Design Guidelines, interaction patterns & visual language. I did this to reduce time spent reinventing the wheel for typography & component styles, as iOS users are already used to this UI.
Fonts used: SF Pro & SF Text
Colors used: from iOS Color Guidelines
Prototype
Click here for interactive Figma Prototype
Homepage
Community & Challenge details pages
Plan Challenge flow
Engagement through notifications
Step 6: Usability study
I tested out the prototypes with the same 5 participants of the earlier study.
Results
Step 7: Way forward
- Make a detailed prototype with real-time data.
- Make hi-fidelity prototypes of two more approaches by changing the position of the Homepage cards. Would then like to A/B test with these with users to see which cards have more CTRs and which structure triggers more forwards flows.
- Work more on Squads, Community & Rewards.
- Find out more about user behavior & make a detailed user journey & empathy map to get a deeper understanding.
- Make some delight factor micro-interactions & animations within the app to increase gamification and engagement. eg. for rewards
- To test with more people and keep iterating!