UX Case Study: Mobile App for a Healthier Lifestyle

Over the past couple years, the world have lived in the state of lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. And according to research, the movement and activity restriction during this lockdown situation have affected the lifestyle of many people. According to Alshahrani et al. (2022), approx. 10% of the population in Saudi Arabia have shifted to overweight or obese BMI from their BMI level pre-pandemic (pre-2020). This is assumed to be associated to the lockdown practices, where lifestyle factors such as dietary choices and physical activity levels played a part. And according to this research, the youth were over 3x more-likely to gain ≥5% weight than the older individuals.

Defining the Problem

This case study’s objective is to help these people to get back on track to a healthier lifestyle post-pandemic by constructing a user-friendly mobile app as a companion. The things that need to be addressed in this case study are:

1. How can we make this practice more accessible and fun for the regular person who gained weight during the pandemic?
2. What are some ways in which people can document their food ingestion?
3. How can we create systems that can promote this healthier lifestyle from a community point of view?

Value Proposition Canvas

After the problem is defined, I would like to create a value proposition canvas to conduct some requirement exploration. In this VPC, I am going to assume that some user research have been conducted and from that process, one specific persona have been made up. You can see the persona description in the VPC below.

Value Proposition Canvas for Persona: Gemma Harris

From the VPC above, we have done a requirement exploration for the app. Gemma is a busy employee who wants to lose weight. For her, manually documenting food ingestion by calories tracking where she has to input her calorie intake every time she eats is not feasible and exhausting, since she prefers ordering food from outside. She also needs a community where she can workout together with, because she has tried watching workout instruction videos from YouTube but it’s not engaging, which lead to procrastination instead.

From the pain points and needs defined, comes the solution where the new app that’s going to be developed could propose solutions such as a functionality of restaurant recommendations that serve healthy menus which we could track the nutrition facts of, and a functionality where users can find community-held routine workout events.

Task Analysis

Task analysis is useful to define the steps that users need to take in order to achieve their goals (task-flow). It is also useful in assessing whether the steps that users need to take is too long or too short. This could be done by constructing a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) diagram. In a diagram, high-level tasks are being broken down into smaller sub-tasks. A task should ideally be broken down into 4–8 subtasks. Otherwise, the task is still too abstract/complex (Interaction Design Foundation, 2021). The HTA diagram constructed based on the 3 min functionalities could be seen below.

Task Analysis 1: Onboarding

Task Analysis 2: Diets

Task Analysis 3: Workouts

Wireframe

Wireframe is made by constructing a mid-fidelity prototype using Figma based on the task-flows that have been defined on the previous stage (task analysis) as seen in the figures below.

Onboarding & Dashboard

Diets Functionality

Workouts Functionality

For more detailed look, these mid-fidelity prototypes can be checked out at https://ristek.link/helty-app.

High-Fidelity Pitch

(WIP)