Vita*, a growing health start-up company, is on a mission to empower people to achieve healthier, fuller lives through sustainable lifestyle change.
Their vision is to inspire and enable people everywhere to live free of chronic disease.
Chronic disease (anywhere between 70-90%) is preventable through making better life choices. And that’s what Vita’s program aims to achieve, the program is for people to eventually go completely plant-based.
Vita would like to combine behavioural science and human-centered design to help people monitor what they put in their body and celebrate what they don’t, because helping people eat better is the first step to fighting chronic disease.
*Vita is a hypothetical company by General Assembly
Truthfully, we know the first step of battling chronic diseases is changing our diets, yet so many of us choose not to… why?
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the top cause of death in Australia is Coronary Heart Disease. In fact, it was one of the top killers in every group, age 25 to 95+, see Figure 3.2.
The most prominent assumptions we had were based around habitual behaviour. We wanted to know the the motivations surrounding such behaviour that lead to certain lifestyle habits and choices. We wanted to find what made people accountable for their choices and distinguish how people were proactive/reactive to habitual changes.
As the topic was so broad, we chose not to target a specific demographic or geographic as it would restrict our research. We gathered as much information as we could that would help us understand users eating habits and approach to dietary goals.
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Interview Insights
11 User Interviews
• We broadly defined three areas in our affinity map: current health mindset, barriers and opportunities
• Almost all users would rather not use their spare time to achieve healthy eating
• The barriers (time, location, taste and circumstances) users faced were mostly related to convenience and long-term habits
• Collaboration, accountability and influence were major factors in a person’s health journey
Survey Insights
97 Survery Responses
• Most people rate their current health ‘good’ ( 44%), yet more than 50% were not tracking their health
• Various definitions of what ‘healthy eating’ is, mostly defined as balanced eating
• Various ways of tracking health, and these informed our competitive and comparative analysis (below)
• More than 80% of individuals believe eating healthy is important
• More than 70% of individuals set healthy goals for themselves
Interestingly we discovered that users all defined 'healthy eating' differently, and this definition was usually aligned with their current health goals and habits.
Summary:
The market is continuously expanding, so after much discussion we concluded that it was anyone who took the attention away from our potential solution (direct), or our business goal (indirect).
Our survey results helped us defined the following direct and indirect competitors below:
We dug further and researched the science behind habit formation change and came across The 21/90 Rule.
The 21/90 Rule states that it takes 21 days to make a habit and 90 days to make a lifestyle change. The 21-day myth began as a misinterpretation of Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s work on self-image. Maltz did not find that 21 days of task completion forms a habit. However, the time frame is short enough to be inspiring, but long enough to be believable.
"..it requires a minimum of 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell"
- James Clear writer of Atomic Habits - (Article: https://jamesclear.com/new-habit)
This could be the 'Placebo Effect' coming into play in changing mindsets to foster habitual behaviour.
The placebo may increase a person's motivation to take better care of themselves. It is triggered by the person's belief in the positive benefits and may start from one small task at a time.
"The placebo effect is more than positive thinking — believing a treatment or procedure will work. It's about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together,"
Professor Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
"It's not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold."
- Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit)
We had recognised four personas from our research by taking snippets to conduct an empathy map within a Venn diagram (see below).
We believe that by targeting Charli will enable us to have the biggest audience reach, as they are proactive in seeking more out of life through any and every opportunity, especially when it comes to health.
Charli’s only problem (pain point) is not being able to see through to the long term end goal, as they’re so easily influenced and willing to try new things, they only set short term achievable goals for themselves.
Pain Point
• The pain point usually occurs before the dip in emotion. The dip is usually a decision point where one would decide to continue or give-up
• This could be influences from environmental, physical, emotional factors that contribute to the decision point
Opportunity
• To eliminate the point before the dip in emotion and thus help our users become proactive and remove the thought and therefore potential shortfalls in their eating choices
• To motivate the user to be better, and make small changes towards ultimately becoming plant-based
How might we help Charli build better eating habits to sustain a healthier lifestyle?
Due to time constraints, we decided to take on one specific How Might We (HMW) in our design sprint (8mins).
We presented and discussed our sketched ideas to what best addressed the problem statement, which we later mashed up to form our proposed solution.
Solution Summary:
• 21 Day Challenge - setting an achievable goal and timeline
• Habit Builder - smalls wins to emphasise efforts that make lasting change and commitment
• Tasks / Logging - fun and simple tasks to aid habit builder
• Collaboration and Accountability - bringing people together to take on the challenge, the leaderboard allows people to track and encourage each other
Our design studio enabled us to easily create a userflow based on the onboarding through to completing the first set of daily challenges.
Here’s where we started to rush things as we had 3 days left. We managed to round up 5 users for testing and got feedback on structure, flow, copy and overall experience, which allowed us to iterate and move onto designing our low-fidelity prototype that we used in our final presentation.
Inclusions:
• Achievable daily challenges that are tailored to our primary persona, sitting within a larger 21 day challenge (proven to build a habit)
• Educational option where users are able to 'learn more' about topics from the challenges
• Not just based on tracking and logging eating habits, as many existing solutions already do this; but more towards proactively preventing users from turning to unhealthy eating
• Points earned for continuous challenge completion and ability to also send friends additional challenges
• Ability to collaborate with and encourage friends (claps), or just to remain accountable
Content Strategy + Animation
Develop a dynamic tone of voice that’s uplifting and comical so that users have ‘fun’ while doing the challenges
Challenges Vita Approved
Work with Vita to develop challenges that tailor specifically to Vita’s programs so that its easy for users to transition later on
High-Fidelity Testing
Complete more testing with all 4 personas and iterate further based on appropriate feedback
Retention
Possibility to further turn the app more 'game-like' by challenging friends to gain points for completing challenges to unlock bonuses
