Bridging wellness goals to social activities
In the digital age, young people are transforming the pursuit of health and wellness into a shared adventure through mobile apps. These virtual connections blur the line between staying fit and having fun, offering a support system that cheers, challenges, and keeps users accountable. This case study explores how these connections are the key ingredient for young individuals looking to cultivate healthy habits.
The purpose of this project is to learn how the users experience the Social feature on a health and wellness mobile app and to find out if there are any pain points in taking part in activities, sharing content and consuming content from their Social feed.
Increase user sign-ups and retain existing users by engaging them with activities that will develop good micro-habits for users.
  1. Learn if users are keen to explore the content shared by others
  2. Discover if people are willing to share content
  3. Find out if users understand how the Social feature works
UX Researcher and Designer
Research Insights
P0 tasks (High priority)
  • Users want to know the relationship between goals and activities
  • Some context is needed for users to select a goal and discover activities
P1 tasks (Essential updates)
  • Fix spacing between categories for better visual hierarchy and scanning
  • Distinguish media-playing posts from photo posts on Social
Design Iterations
Content page before usability study
Content page after usability study
In the original design, the general feedback is that it’s difficult to find specific activity because all the cards are the same size. There also isn’t enough room between categories to separate them from other categories. In short, users cannot scan across the page to find the right activity.
In the new design, I introduced more negative space to partition the page better for scanning and each category has an alternating background colour. Both the horizontal scroll and lighter text weight reduce cognitive load and further assist users in scanning.
Social page before usability study
Social page after usability study
Insights from user testing also revealed that users cannot distinguish across media on the Social page. The small black play button is not good for scanning and some participants could not find the play button as they expected the media to play from pressing the image.
We then moved the video and music play button on top of the image while photo generation and blog articles have a different button to distinguish the content even further. Both UI - on Content and Social pages - iterations resolve a high impact, low effort task from my list of recommended actions.
Homepage before usability study
Homepage after usability study

Finally, we want to redesign the homepage based on 2 insights during user testing:

  1. The goal images do not inform or assist in goal selection and the design looks dated.
  2. The cards have different sizes leading to the incorrect assumption by testers that they have different level of importance. Smaller cards are ignored consistently.
In this new design, I decided to peg an object or element to represent each goal. A short context is also given to help users select a goal and understand what these goals are for.
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More importantly, all goal cards have equal weight and size - highlighted on the top of page to indicate hierarchy of information. The challenge card is separated and placed below the goal-setting carousel - it does not have the same weight as the goals.

This iteration resolves two P0 (high priority) tasks from my research insights.
Final Thoughts
In our journey to enhance our wellness app, user testing has been our North Star. Through rounds of insightful feedback, we've made significant improvement in the content, social, and home pages. These iterations were driven by real user experiences, ensuring that our design aligns with user expectations. Our next cycle of user interviews will dive deeper into the new homepage navigation, a crucial step in fine-tuning the user journey.
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Above all, this process underscores a vital lesson: user testing isn't just a checkbox; it is the compass that keeps us on course, reminding us that the most brilliant ideas can only realise when they align with users' needs. As our app continues to evolve, we're committed to keeping the user's voice at the forefront of our design decisions.

p/theo

Appeared in Turkiye, Sri Lanka, Germany, New Zealand, Colombia and Singapore