RenuMi
Mobile Health & Fitness App
Overview
Role: UX/UI Designer
RenuMi is a hypothetical user-centric diet and fitness mobile app that offers an engaging and motivating experience for individuals on their health journey. With a focus on personalization and progress, RenuMi strives to meet the evolving goals and needs of users. By fostering a supportive community, encouraging knowledge sharing, and promoting accountability, RenuMi enhances the user experience and empowers long-term behavior change.
The problem that RenuMi aims to address is the lack of a user-friendly and personalized mobile app that promotes and supports healthy lifestyle choices. Many existing health and fitness apps on the market lack the ability to provide tailored recommendations and fail to create an engaging and motivating user experience. Additionally, there is a need for a supportive community aspect to foster self-determination and sustainable lifestyle changes.
The goal was to create a competitive product that provides an intuitive user experience, offering value beyond merely achieving weight loss goals. In addition, the business goal was to generate profit by way of sponsorship and affiliate and referral marketing with potential for premium subscription, and limiting in-app advertisement. Objectives included determining user views, exploring preventative health integration, understanding the learning process, and identifying user difficulties.
Competitive Research and User Interviews
I conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis of the top market competitors focusing on their reliability of nutrition and exercise resources, web traffic, and ratings. This analysis allowed me to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors, and more importantly, discover unique differentiators that would set this app apart from the competition.
Afterwards, I conducted user interviews with participants of various ages where I gathered valuable insights into their ideal experience for a health app. This pivotal step played a crucial role in shaping my goal and defining the actual problems that users face when seeking information about health. It helped establish a clear direction and focus for addressing these challenges effectively.
Research Findings
To synthesize the data, I utilized Figjam to create an Affinity map. This allowed me to consolidate and organize the most frequent and recurring responses from all participants, streamlining the findings and providing valuable insights.
The major findings from user interviews were:
Health is a significant importance
Interest in tracking diet and increasing activity
Ease of use and more personalization is the most ideal experience
Difficult/overwhelming information, cost, and time management are major pain points
The findings provided valuable information on the desired user experience, major pain points, areas for improvement, as well as user goals and needs. With this comprehensive understanding, I gained clarity on how to begin designing a user-centric product that prioritizes ease of use and caters to the needs of the users.
Ideation
After synthesizing the data, I proceeded to create Point of Views (POVs) and How Might We (HMW) statements to explore potential solutions for addressing user needs and pain points. This process helped me define two specific problems and determine the user needs, which in turn provided design opportunities.
Based on the trends from the Affinity Map, this resulted to the creation of my POVs:
POV: I would like to explore ways to make it easier for people concerned about their health to find and narrow down their search for nutrition and exercise information because people have a hard time in general finding health information personalized for them.
POV: I would like to explore ways to encourage health conscious people to track their diet and physical activity routinely because they are interested in the idea and want to put it into action but do not have the motivation to spend time learning how to do it.
POV: I would like to explore ways to help people of various degrees of health knowledge understand the information presented to them because people are often deterred as soon as they find the information confusing, repetitive or unrelated.
POV: I would like to explore ways to keep users who are looking to make a healthy change engaged and consistent because lifestyle changes are a journey and keeping people motivated and encouraged can be difficult especially when they get off track.
To further understand the users, I developed two personas based on the insights gathered from the interviews, as well as their characteristics and current statuses. This step was important in determining the key factors that would attract users to the app and drive their continued engagement.
Personas
Sara Cook, Persona #1, was created by combining 5 of the participants interviewed:
3 of them have had experience in healthcare.
4 were or currently are single mothers.
All 5 are health conscious and would like to be healthier for their family by tracking more of their diet and exercise, but struggle due to prioritizing their family first. Time is very limited for them.
All 5 play Pickleball.
The remaining 2 female participants that were interviewed who did not fit the persona were used to add more depth.
Andrew Johnson, Persona #2, was created by using the remaining 2 male participants interviewed:
Both are very active and healthy with a schedule, but have not put enough effort into tracking their diet and exercise.
1 works in IT while the other is very interested in technology. Both have a goal to gain muscle.
1 tracks his steps via smartwatch and prefers to use Youtube as his source of information.
1 is using exercise as a way to meet people.
Using these personas as a foundation, I then crafted storyboards that depicted how each persona tackled both problems identified through the POVs and HMWs. Storyboarding was important to visualize the user's journey and served as a starting point for creating user flows. Additionally, I began shaping the brand values and identity to align with the user's needs and preferences. By following this process, I ensured that the design solutions were rooted in a deep understanding of the user and their context, leading to effective low-fidelity wireframes and a cohesive brand identity that resonated with the target audience.
Wireframes
The initial step in the design process involved creating low-fidelity prototypes using Figma based on user flows. The user flows I developed were derived from key insights gathered during user interviews, which highlighted the importance of tracking diet and activity, prioritizing health, managing time effectively, and seeking an easy-to-use and personalized experience. These insights led to the creation of user and task flows, focusing on delivering a personalized experience during account creation, meal planning, and activity search.
With these user journeys, the goal when designing the low-fidelity prototypes was to establish a familiar and easily understandable outline. This iterative process allowed for testing and exploring various iterations to identify what works effectively. It served as an important phase for establishing the foundation and direction of the design, as it is essential to address any potential errors before advancing to the mid-fidelity prototype stage.
Following the low-fidelity prototypes, the wireframes were taken to the mid-fidelity and high-fidelity design stages. In these stages, the wireframes became more detailed, capturing the user's journey from the initial desire to start a task through the app, to successfully implementing it through actionable steps. These stages showcased a final layout of elements and features, emphasizing the user experience and enabling a better understanding of their potential actions. This stage provided opportunities to design and refine the user experience for usability testing, ensuring an intuitive and seamless interaction with the app.
Usability Testing
During the testing phase, participants were assigned three specific tasks, aiming to gain comprehensive insights into the user experience and determine how to incorporate their feedback for iterative improvements. The testing process enabled the measurement of design effectiveness, identification of user errors, and provided valuable insights on enhancing user satisfaction.
After completing the testing phase, I utilized Figjam once again to organize the test results. This process involved extracting valuable user feedback, identifying common patterns, and brainstorming ideas for enhancing the design based on successful elements and areas that required improvement. This crucial step served as a bridge between testing and design iteration, as it helped uncover design effectiveness and revealed any critical errors that needed addressing before moving forward.
Usability Test Results
After completing the testing phase, I utilized Figjam once again to organize the test results. This process involved extracting valuable user feedback, identifying common patterns, and brainstorming ideas for enhancing the design based on successful elements and areas that required improvement. This crucial step served as a bridge between testing and design iteration, as it helped uncover design effectiveness and revealed any critical errors that needed addressing before moving forward.
Success Metrics:
Task Completion: 5/5 participants completed all the tasks
Task duration: 5/5 participants were able to complete each task between 2-4 mins
Ease of use: 5/5 participants felt that overall it was simple or self-explanatory and easy to understand
Frequency of Errors:
1/5 participants experienced an error performing task #1
5/5 participants experienced multiple errors performing task #2
3/5 participants experienced an error performing task #3
User Satisfaction:
Task #1 Average Rating: 8.6/10
Task #2 Average Rating: 7.2/10
Task #3 Average Rating: 8/10
Overall User Experience Average Rating: 7.8/10
Most Common Issues:
All 5 participants struggled with creating a meal, with 2/5 worried their progress would be erased if using the back button.
3 of 5 participants had some trouble understanding that “P”, “F”, and “C” were the macronutrients and would have liked to have had those spelled out.
3 of 5 participants tried to use the hamburger icon to find where they were supposed to go instead of the journal icon.
5 of 5 participants agreed that labels for icons would be more helpful for navigating.
Iteration
A comprehensive flow encompassing all three tasks was designed, integrating user testing feedback and accounting for different user choices and potential errors. This involved designing frames for every user interaction to encourage creativity and exploration while delivering a personalized experience. By consolidating all three tasks, I gained a deeper understanding of the user experience, focusing on creating a seamless and intuitive design that promotes ease of use.
Conclusion
In summary, I am confident that I have successfully designed a hypothetical health app that fulfills the objective of delivering an intuitive user experience that is both familiar and engaging. Given sufficient time, the next phase of design and user testing would have involved the creation of health groups and communities, as well as implementing gamification elements for goals and challenges. Despite the initial project goal undergoing modifications based on the research findings, the final product reflects an effective and promising health mobile app that caters to both new and existing users, positioning it as a strong contender in the current market.
