A new app for the National Wellness Institute UX Case Study

What we eat doesn’t just affect our physical health: it can also affect our mental health and wellbeing. Studies show that good food choices have a positive impact on health and poor diets have negative long-term effects.

Team

Corina Matusoiu & Shaden Boustany

My role

UX/UI designer

Duration

10 day sprint

Tools

Figma, Miro

Small Steps

Big habits start small

As part of our training for Ironhack, working with a partner, we were tasked to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for the National Wellness Institute (NWI).

NWI offers certification and training for wellness professionals, as well as tools and frameworks they can use to help their clients achieve wellness goals. Even though NWI has numerous years of experience in the wellness field, their program has been slow to catch up with technology. They have seen a substantial drop in memberships and want to find a way to add value to their members. To do this they decided to focus on two things: Create a set of digital wellness tools for Wellness coaches & Update their image.

Research

Wellness is a subject affected by so many factors that we knew we had to choose one. Our secondary research helped us narrow our focus towards nutrition because it is a critical part of health and wellbeing. Better nutrition is related to improved infant, child and maternal health, stronger immune systems, safer pregnancy and childbirth, lower risk of non-communicable diseases (such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease), and longevity.

Besides, this subject occupies important shares of market:

The global market for weight loss products and services: Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.2% (2021–2026)
Growth also forecasted for other Nutrition related industries
Causes: Health concerns, obesity rates and increase in per capita disposable income

Sources: PR Newswire, Research and Markets

To get a better sense of the app’s potential user base, we asked questions both with an online survey and six in-depth interviews of people interested in nutrition. Our main concerns were:

identifying people’s level of knowlege about nutrition
the importance of good nutrition in their lives
their struggles with maintaining good nutritional habits.

Findings from research, interviews and survey:

most people that associate nutrition to wellbeing evaluate themselves as being very knowledgeable in nutrition matters
for them good nutrition equals a healthy diet where they get their daily requirements of nutrients and vitamins
they believe the best way to have a good diet is home cooking
the main challenges they face in trying to have good eating habits is the lack of time for cooking at home and the stress from everyday life pushing them to make unhealthy choices
most of them had used diet apps in the past but they were now focused more on eating a balanced diet and less concerned about their weight or counting calories

Key quotes directly from our users:

“I have stopped focusing on my weight, the most important thing for me right now is eating healthy and feeling good in my body."

“I don’t always eat healthy because I don’t always have time to cook. Cooking takes alot of organising and sometimes life gets in the way.”

Define

From here, we crafted our persona and our problem statement to unify our findings and give ourselves resources to refer back to as we began to ideate for solutions.

Sarah’s user journey helps us find her painpoints during a normal day in her life. She wakes up with the intention of having nutritious meals throughout the day but starts off not having time to cook a healthy breakfast as planned. The lack of organisation doesn’t allow her to go grocery shopping and she has a hard time fiding healthy recipes that don’t take a long time to prepare.

Biggest pain point is late afternoon when she finds herself in a downward spiral of low energy and lack of focus where she keeps opting for unhealthy “pick me up” snacks.

Problem statement

People who lead busy and stressful lives need a way to build healthy eating habits and cook fast nutritious meals because they consider good nutrition an essential part of their wellbeing and their current lifestyle prevents them from doing so in an enjoyable and consistent way.

Hypothesis statement

We believe that by creating a habit building app oriented towards home cooking and that breaks down big tasks into small, manageable ones we will help busy and stressed users succeed at developing healthy eating habits. We will know we have succeeded when 70% of unboarded active users of the app reach their individually set goals within their specific timeframes.

Ideate

To reflect the universe that we wanted to put our user into, we created a moodboard that shows the feelings that our app should inspire. The main idea is to bring the user into a energetic friendly mood, with warm colos, where he can find healthy recipes that help him recharge his batteries.

Prototype & Test

It took us a few days of sorting through ideas, using the Crazy 8 method, Bad Idea — Good idea, mid fi prototypes, usability testing and ideating again, to finalise our hi fidelity prototype that included:

the onboarding flow
the main home page
pages for choosing recipes and creating a menu for the week
the flow for shopping, preparing, cooking and celebrating
a Stats page to track progress

Let me introduce you to Small Steps: an app meant to help its users build small habits of cooking at home. For this, the app takes away the responsibility of thinking ahead, planning and organising. It provides quick, healthy, recipes for all the meals of the day, it plans the shopping list, reminds the user to make the preparation and after cooking it celebrates their succes!

The first 2 screens are all about explaining what the app does for the user and a description of the 5 steps it takes to reach a goal.

The onboarding continues with setting up an account and a goal for the upcoming week. The user also has the option of setting up more distant goals in regards to the total amount of cooked meals and levels of energy — this will also allow him to track his progress.

The next part shows the process of selecting a category of recipes, the recipes for the week and a commitment to self. It gives the user the drive and the will to get through seemingly unpleasant and uncertain experiences in the present moment which will lead to reward in the future.

As one of the goals set for this app is to take away from the user the responsibility of thinking ahead, planning and organising, it allows the possibility of setting reminders to every task. Pictured above is the shopping day notification screen, the complete shopping list and the instructions for the preparation day.

The final steps are pictured above in a page with the last instructions for cooking, and as soon as the “I DID IT!” is cheched a screen with confetti and Congratulations appears as promised in the beggining —celebrating small successes is one of the keys that help habits stick. A button inviting the user to check his progress takes us to the last screens of this flow.

The progress page above shows how the app could look like after 5 weeks of use. It would allow the user to have a visual representation of their evolution on the app and help keep themselves accountable.

Further testing showed the users were excited about using our app as they found that the concept would really help them stay on track organising their time to prepare delicious healthy meals for them and their families. A thing we didn't really consider in the beggining, as we only conceived the app for users cooking only for themselves, so more ideation to follow!

Thank you for reading and don't hesitate to write if you are interested in working with me.

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SMALL STEPS App