Ux case study: Verve Health

As a Graphic Designer amid the COVID-19 pandemic, on a whim, we decided to throw ourselves on the path to a new career and diving into the world of UX Design. Amongst the social distancing, isolation and our 1 hour of daily exercise, what better a time than now to diverge and converge our way through the Double Diamond.

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Who the  is Verve?

Verve is a not-for-profit organisation whose goal is to empower people to achieve healthier, fuller lives by promoting sustainable lifestyle changes.

Their mission is to build better lives “one broccoli at a time”, using behaviour science to help change people’s habits and improve their health whilst reducing the risk of chronic disease. They aim to live the mission through education, honesty and empowerment.

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The problem

Verve stated that Australia’s number one killer has been identified as Coronary Heart Disease supported by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). In fact between 70–90% of chronic diseases are preventable through making better life choices.

How will they make lives better? More veggies! Verve aims to focus on helping people eat better by applying their behavioural science to switch users to a plant-based diet.

Verve wants to scale and scale fast, ultimately to an audience of 100 million by 2023. To meet the high distribution needs Verve has recognised that the best way to scale their program would be through a digital platform via a web or native app.

Verve has set a high bar — how do we approach this? It starts with a jump…

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Let’s get this party started…

Teaming up with Kyle and Benita, we promptly dubbed ourselves YEET! and Delete!, naming ourselves the Three Musketeers seemed passé. Lets talk roles:

Armed with the holy trinity of UXsolation — Zoom, Miro and Figma we set off on our adventure and take on the gargantuan research project ahead.

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Discover

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Lettuce go to the “Market”

Looking into the current market for health apps, we promptly discovered how saturated it is with the general app market is set at 462 billion in 2019. The value of mHealth apps is further projected to reach 189 billion by 2025. The pie is big and it has a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) 29.2%during the forecast period 2020–2027.

The rate of growth allowed us to consider that it is worth taking a slice out of this pie.

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Competition

Scoping out the market diving nose deep into all the available apps we came to discover a slew of apps that seem to include to varying degree three elements, Food Logging + Tracking, Exercise Tracking and Habit tracking.

Omada Health was listed as a key competitor by Verve’s project brief with Livongo also a key competitor of Omada’s — they are both focused on particular chronic conditions. Looking at Omada’s onboarding process we noticed that they gently guide users who do not have diabetes away from the program, so they are not throwing their net out quite as wide as what Verve hopes to in terms of users and also limited in their ability to scale.

My Fitness Pal is one of the most popular apps holding the top rankings in the app stores and this is supported by our survey results with 57.7% of respondent stating that they use the app. This helped us identify MFP as a key competitor. We identified them as our primary competitor for a more internationally reaching program that is open to anyone trying to maintain their health in a better way, and that have an online presence.

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Looking further into My Fitness Pal — we mapped the user's journey throughout the use of my fitness pal to understand their frustrations and uncover potential opportunities for improvement that we could learn from.

How do we change behaviours?
Users agree that when they’ve been gorging themselves on a protein-rich diet transitioning to a prodominately vegetable-based diet left them feeling hungry and unsatiated. The biggest question on my mind is — how do we change learned behaviours?

We started off by looking into Behaviour Change Frameworks. After interviewing subject matter experts and nutritionists we identified three principles that have worked well when changing dietary choices.

• Positive Affective Attitudes: promoting positive feelings about behaviour change
• Self-efficacy: increasing people’s belief in their ability to change their behaviours
• Intention/goal setting: helping people set goals and form plans on how to achieve them

Reaching out to a behavioural change specialist, they pointed us in the direction of habit-forming principles and from our research we identified that changing habits rely on habit-forming and reforming that we could implement into our solution.

• Small, specific actions are more likely to become habitual
• Making the action easy to do increases the likelihood that it becomes a habit
• Having visual cues associated with them will be easier to create and maintain
• With this crucial knowledge in mind, we will be able to design a system that will have a longer-lasting impact on our users.

Our Assumptions about the subject…

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Writing our assumptions and mapping them we came to define some topics and generate some user research objectives.

User Research Goals

• What people’s perception of ‘healthy eating’ is?
• How do we motivate people to eat healthy?
• What currently works?
• What’s the behavioural science behind breaking habits?
• Why are the majority of people not eating healthy?
• Why don’t people don’t eat healthy now?

And such we begin our primary research…

20 — user interviews

3 — Subject-matter experts

123 — survey responses

We started with a survey to gain some quantitive data into what users. After successfully infiltrating various online communities we managed to net 123 survey responses in total. We were able to recruit interviewees from our survey treating it as a screening process to find the perfect guinea pigs… I mean interviewees. *Cue doctor evil laugh*

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Define

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User research (affinity map)

After gaining some insights from our user research, it is time to synthesise our findings through affinity mapping.

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We identified three main takeaways that we learnt from our users:

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Sustainability

Desire to ideally not think about diet, just intuitively live healthily

People want to be healthy, but they have not had sustainable success with highly restrictive diets. They don’t want to think about it constantly and can’t, so their health levels fluctuate.

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Challenging

Maintaining a new is always a struggle, but there is added extra pressure with the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is always pressure in life with so much to do and so little time, but with the drastic changes that COVID-19 ushered in people have been losing their ability to control their lives as they were previously or are experiencing more emotional strain preventing them from achieving dietary goals.

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Connection

Regular contact with the community and celebrating small wins

People desire regular connection with others, whether while doing sport, being involved in a community or keeping track of each other's achievements, this is key to the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle

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What Archetypes are we targeting?

As Verve’s targeting such a wide demographic we were at a loss when defining our user persona — who our target demographic is. Taking it back a step, we identified three distinct mindsets from our affinity map.

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The primary mindset that we would recommend to Verve would be the mindset that needs to be on top of their health as they would be the best when considering the effort vs impact of defining a solution for them.

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Meet Valerie: User Persona

From our primary research, we developed an archetype of Verve’s user group and dubbed them, Val the Tracker.

“Great health is the best gift I can give my family.”

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What is Val’s problem?

“Val needs a way to gradually form sustainable healthy habits so that they can lead a better quality of life.”

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So How might we..?

How might we assist Val in creating sustainable healthy habits in order to lead a better quality of life?

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Develop

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Ideation

Time to let the ideas flow. We conducted a design studio for the following how might we statements to generate some ideas for our solution whilst keeping our problem statement in mind.

• How might we assist Val in creating sustainable healthy habits in order to lead a better quality of life?
• How might we connect real-life professionals with Val so that she is held accountable and supported in developing healthier habits?
• How might we incentivize positive choices so that Val can develop better health-related habits

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We got off-track but found our way back on course

In the throes of figuring out a way to find a solution that would be suitable for our archetype. We went through many ideas like a plant-based food truck with Verve representatives to educate people about the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle.

Another idea was to create a widget that piggybacked exercise information off the phone’s native health app — the concept involves features, where the widget will congratulate the user when they are achieving their goals or if they aren’t the app, will gently nudge the user into to the right direction with an option to contact a physician or a representative.

We digressed after deciding that these outcomes would not be able to scale to the degree that would meet Verve’s goals.

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Introducing! Verve Health!

Verve Health is an application designed to help the user keep an eye on what they are eating whilst noting how they are feeling on a day to day basis. Over time the user will be able to reflect on their diet and with the assistance of the application be able to draw insights based on what goes into their body and correlate it to their energy levels and mood. The idea of this is to help users develop an intuitive understanding of what their body needs rather than relying on an app, influences or diet trends to tell them what they need to put into their body.

Main Features:

• Food with Mood journal to help train the user to listen to what their body needs.
• Notification, Gently nudging users towards healthier options for meals.
• Recipe suggestions
• Exercise tracking
• Positive reinforcement notifications and celebrating the user’s mini victories.

We mapped Valerie’s journey map for our proposed solution to help define the goals of our application.

How will it turn-ip?

Working remotely, collaboratively we sketched a user flow to give us a guide on the screens that we would need to wireframe for our paper prototype. Tanking concepts from our ideation we individually sketched up from frames for Verve Flow and came together to critique each frame and discussing which of the Various Elements

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Once we sketched our frames and created our wire flow — the next step is to jump on to Marvel and create a digital paper prototype to test the validity of our MVP on our users.

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Our feedback:

• The user felt there was a missed opportunity with the app, the features were nice and the approach didn’t make them feel negative about the experience however they felt that the incorporation of a buddy system would be beneficial for the success of the app and changing behaviours with a supportive community.
• There were some misses with the content copy where the term “Fillers” was used to signify carbohydrates — the feedback was that this was a weird term for the context of the app.

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Next Steps

At this point, we had finished our two-week design sprint. As a research-heavy project, the majority of this time was dedicated to research with an extensive list of user interviews and sourcing of experts through unexpected means — I never knew Reddit could be such a good resource for finding subject matter experts!

The next steps of this project would be to define our mid-fidelity prototype with the guidance of our usability testing feedback from our paper prototype and reiteration until we have a final application product.

Another element I would like to develop would be the brand and content strategy for this project — falling back into my comfort zone but using our user research to define it.

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Next Steps for Scale

Keeping Verve’s business goal in mind had more ideas on how we were to scale the Verve application and expand its reach for the user base in the future with further iterations to the application.

• Education campaign: 60.7% of our respondents think that plant-based means 0% meat.
  Slogans like “Think of animal products as a garnish with veggies as the mains” had positive reactions in our ethnographic discussions on Facebook.
• Community creation and support such as a buddy system that allows you to see each other’s progress and send a shout out to mates who are doing well.
• Integration with fitness app for fitness tracking — find a partner app or look into developing one
• Gamification for expansion of younger demographics with further research — an avatar of the user that acts as a Tamagotchi could break into the younger and young-at-heart markets.
• Explore partnerships with companies like medical insurance companies and many others who are willing to enter into partnerships with the objective of incentivizing a healthy lifestyle. — Research
  Expanding the recipe suggestions into more and more cuisine suggestions — plant-based isn’t just chia seeds and shouldn’t be restricted to the recipes most common in the app’s country of origin

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Retrospective

Our team has some major learnings throughout our project and defined them below:

We had a slow start to this project and gaining momentum during our 3 design sprint in a row was difficult however we persevered and conquered our research. Having done almost 20 hours in user interviews and many external conversations with so many people — it was a large research project and we were happy with our outcome in the end.

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