Wellness App - UX Design Report

6 min readApr 15, 2019

As part of the Ironhack’s UI/UX Design Bootcamp, we were assigned with our first individual task; to deliver a Wellness App in just 3 long days. I say long because a lot of work happened during these 3 days. Long story short, the topic I went with was Physical Wellness and narrowed it down to Healthy Food Habits. I am really passionate about this particular topic so I thought this is the best time to make something useful for other people as well. And by other people, I mean students mostly because I have had a time when I was having this problem as well.

Agenda

To make this project come to life I had to follow these steps:

Prepare a Survey first and then send it out
Gather more data through Interviews
Make an Affinity Diagram with all the data collected through surveys and interviews
Create a Persona
Start the Ideation
Crazy 8's
Test and Iterate
Create the Wireframes in Sketch
Create the Prototype in Invision
Takeaways

Discovery

In this phase, my aim was to gather as much information as possible. So I started with the Survey first.

Thanks to the Lean Survey Canvas I prepared a couple of question on which I thought would help me dig deeper within this topic. I created a survey on Google Forms and tried to push it as much as I could to some media channels. While waiting for the survey to do its thing, I did not lose time and tried to find people to interview so I could find out more about their eating habits and what were their concerns and struggles. I did interview 5 people, which resulted in some good insights.

I left the survey on for a day due to the time restrictions of this project. Some of the main results I found are as follow.

To make it more easy for you to read, here are the most interesting results:

60% thought today I should eat better
80% prefer to cook their own food
58.2% have time as a blocker and18.2% both budget and time

The interviews also did have a really big impact on what would come later.
Here I have selected some quotes from the people I interviewed, which I found to be the most interesting.

“I try at least to get one healthy meal per day, but sometimes I got lost in my routine and I end up buying junk food, because they’re the only one open during late hours.”
“I wish I could plan ahead for the whole week sometimes, but it’s so hard for me to decide. Also I wish I changed my meal plan from time to time”

Affinity Diagram

Having all the data from the survey and from the interviews I then proceeded to create the Affinity Diagram. I did this in order to find similar patterns and behaviors.

After a few thinking and going around all that data I had, it became a bit hard to try to categorize them. So I classified them into three main categories which were Making an Effort, Blockers, and App Users Liked (I did include some question in the survey and interviews to find out if they did try to use an app for this particular topic). Having the Affinity Diagram finished, my Problem Statement was born:

Students need a way to plan for the whole week because they don’t have time to do it during weekdays.

It was time to create the Persona. And it looked like this:

Ideation

Discovery phase was done and so for this project to move forward, it was time to start the Ideation.

I listed down everything that came out from my research and started to think of how can I make this app work. I must say, that this was very challenging because having in mind all the results, I had too much data that I could not disregard in order to make this a better and a more full solution. But having time as a drive, I focused on the Food Planner and also the Motivation and Goals.

Prototyping

Furthermore, I did some Crazy 8’s. I did a couple of them because I was not happy yet.

My most important feature would be the personalized Food Planner, which works simultaneously with Motivation and Goals.

Food Planner is a set of meals of your preference which will be based on preference such as the meal of the day, the time it will take to cook, budget, cuisine (This is set on the profile which was not displayed here because the idea of this prototype is for a person who is already a user. I chose this particular case, because of time constraints I had for this project.). The goal is to at least get one healthy meal per day. Within the app, you would be able to check your achievements as well. I tried to make it more fun and easier to read through some images, a mascot and a reward system to keep the user engaged. Based on my ideation research and ideation phase there is no food planning without no shopping list, so yea I added a shopping cart as well. The users have the need to have a shopping list and to be reminded on time if they have some items missing.

After a few rounds, I did get this working prototype on paper which I went out and tested.

The prototype is looked like this.

Very interesting results came out of this. It’s amazing what you can find through user testing.
Anyways, having my user feedback in mind I went to Sketch and started to create the wireframes. I incorporated on them the necessary changes that came out of the testing.

The link to the working prototype you can find it here https://invis.io/2BRHS8ZGX94

Takeaways

This was a very tough and challenging project for me, I would say the most challenging so far in Ironhack. And here I have listed a few notes to my future self and hopefully will help some of you out there too.

Before going and diving into the unknown make sure your objective or goal is crystal clear to you. This will all be easier when you have a clear idea in mind.
When doing surveys and interviews make sure to have your questions as specific as possible, to help you understand better the problem. At some point, I felt I had too much data and I could not make a correlation between them during the Affinity Diagram phase.
Don’t think of the solution before going to the Ideation Phase. Focus on whatever part of the process you are on.
Under time constraints, make sure to plan ahead and no matter what stick to that plan.
Make mistakes early. Make a working prototype and go out there test it. You will find out more about your design doing this than going over and over design variations.
Never forget the goal of the project. During each phase, remember why you are doing this, do not get distracted on small details.
Next time, do user testing with a low fidelity prototype on InVision. I am terrible at sketching, so when doing user testing I was losing time explaining icons and writings. Finish the Crazy 8’s and take it to Sketch before going to user testing.