Creating a wellness app from scratch— Case study
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Jobs To Be Done, Emotions, Psychology

Jobs to be done interviews clearly is one of my favorite UX Design tools, even though they are a challenge. Getting to the bottom of a user’s true or hidden desires is both fascinating and tricky. Our subject — emotions — was more touchy than I had expected, and I was very surprised to discover how powerful this method is, but also, how delicate. I’m going to deploy here the UX process used to create a wellness app from scratch, and show how JTBD interviews played a decisive role in the creation of the concept and functionalities of the app.

The brief

“The Wellness Institute is very excited to explore how they can leverage technology to help people live a healthier life.

The institute defines wellness as an active process through which people try to improve or maintain their well-being. But they noticed that despite the vast availability of personal metrics and health apps, people continue to struggle.

They would like you to propose a new mobile app designed to support wellness.

The only requirement is that it tracks the user’s progress and pushes them to commit to a healthier lifestyle. Based on user research, you’ll identify an opportunity for an app to improve people’s day-to-day lives.”

The users

Our users were 5 men and women, some of them from Paris and others from Beirut, and their age went from 25 to 45 years old.

The team

We were a team of two UX/UI Designers, Sarah-Lee Accaoui and myself.

Organization first

Choosing your own UX strategy gives you both a great sense of freedom and a feeling of careful organization. It really makes sense to plan ahead and time every productive method you’ll use, it’s reassuring and in our case, it has really proven its effectiveness. A calendar for the next two weeks on Mural did the trick. Our UX tools were written on post-it notes, ready to be placed at the right time, according to the needs of this specific mission. It wasn’t necessary to use them all, so the choice was decisive. It can also be changed along the way, but it’s nice to have a vague idea, from the start, of everything that needs to be done, and it also invites to timebox much more each part of the process.

Secondary research

For this secondary research, we visited datagouv.fr, odoxa.fr and Inserm.fr, where we discovered the extent of mental health problems throughout the population. Mostly caused by the sanitary crisis, these problems also predated the covid pandemic. Indeed, the tense social climate that reigned in France, with strikes and middle class poverty, was not ideal : nearly one person in five has suffered or will suffer from depression in his or her lifetime.

Market research

Screen captures of the existing AI chatbot Replika

If you type the words “depression” or “emotion” in the app store, you’ll discover that there are a lot of mood trackers, especially on meditation apps, and we were intrigued by the very successful app Replika, offering a digital companion, a female-faced chatbot that works thanks to artificial intelligence. It seemed to come straight out of an episode of Black Mirror, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”, in which a young girl received as a birthday present a new AI robot, inspired by the personality of her favorite singer. The robot becomes her imaginary friend and as in any good episode of Black Mirror, things get creepy. This is what we should avoid, we thought, despite the curiosity this app provoked in us. With our desire in mind, to create something serious but fun and smooth, we thought : light-hearted, comforting and useful, yes, but creepy science fiction, no. Nobody wants to end up in love with their phone like Joaquin Phoenix in Her.

Snapshot of the Black Mirror Episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”

Survey

Discovering the results of our first survey made me realize the power of numbers. Surveys are very useful to validate or invalidate assumptions, and to realize that the image we create of reality in our minds, through our experience, can be far from what it really is.

We created a survey to which 66 english-speaking persons and 45 french-speaking persons responded, which allowed us to discover that 21.2% of people regularly experience emotional distress. For 10.8% of them it is intense (for 44.6% it is average, and 44.6% it is mild), for 80% of people it lasts from 1 to 4 days, for 3.2% it lasts 1 year and for 7.9% it lasts more than a year, which means that it is a real problem, and that it would be good to address it. 47.7% of people feel left to deal with their problems on their own. 53% of people experience a drop in energy and 53.5% have insomnia when their mood is low. 60.6% of people think they identify their emotions easily while 39.4% rarely understand what happens to them when they’re in a bad mood.

One of the most interesting results was this one:

When something bad happens to them, 39,7% of people experience sadness, 22,7% of them, fear, and 22,7% anger. The prevalence of sadness, anger and anxiety was as present in the survey as it would later be in the interviews. It was very important to take into account the fact that the context in which people would use our app would most certainly be an intense moment of anger, sadness or anxiety. Since the percentage of people protecting themselves through denial was not quite minimal (10.6%), we decided that this reaction should also be taken into consideration.

Jobs to be Done interviews

We interviewed 5 people using the Jobs to be Done method, a way of interviewing that allows designers to understand people’s motivations and deep desires, by focusing on the moments when they made decisions, by observing very precisely the context of these decisions and by tracing back the thread of their thoughts, the origin of their desires and the way these desires evolved. The understanding of problems and needs is derived from the interviewee’s detailed narration of his or her thoughts. The product created afterwards should help the user to accomplish his “job”, here: to quickly get out of a negative and intense emotional state.

At the end of the JTBD interviews, my first impression was that the problem we would seek to solve would be to reduce the duration or intensity of the rush of negative emotions, according to people’s will. For my teammate, it was also about emotional self care, which seemed to me to be very right because we observed that people always noticed a significant improvement in their emotional balance when they took care of their mental health on a daily basis, either by thinking about it and keeping clear goals in mind, or by practicing meditation. We then verified these first impressions with an Empathy Map.

I was overwhelmed by the power of this tool and fascinated by the depth of the conversations that resulted. But I was able to observe from the outset something I hadn’t anticipated at all: the delicacy that this exercise requires. Our subject was tricky because it was very intimate. Our interviewees were very transparent and didn’t seem to be having a bad time, even though thinking about their emotional reactions was not very easy for them. We told them from the beginning that at any time they could ask for a “joker”, meaning : the possibility of moving on to the next question without any explanation. They made very little use of this option. They were themselves curious to better understand their emotional mechanisms in times of crisis, and surprised to rediscover some of the memories they had buried. It was very important to us that at no time did they feel judged, so we would bounce back on only some of the things they were saying, checking that we had understood, and sometimes making it clear that we thought these kinds of reactions were universal. We took the time to show our understanding. But in spite of all this, following these interviews, we remained worried, hoping that we had not instilled any flaws in their balance, because despite all these precautions, some were a little hard on themselves, and others were shocked by the discovery of their denial, of what they had buried to reassure themselves. Discovering how destabilizing this subject could be, we preferred to cancel the last interview since the person had told us about his fragility.

Snapshot of Spike Jonze’s movie Her

Several interviews were incredibly insightful, which made the synthesis particularly difficult. We tried to focus on the theme of psychological patterns : the recurring reactions that happened in each of the described situations. Here is a sum up of what seemed to me to be the most insightful interview:

One interviewee had always been very sensitive, and really needed to be understood in debates, but he had trouble remaining calm and was very triggered when someone used a hurtful tone of voice, a word that shocked him, or when a person couldn’t understand him at all. He was relieved each time another person in the room understood him and intervened to explain better what he was trying to say. Since childhood, reading has always been his magical recipe to feel calmer instantaneously. No matter how strong his emotions, it never kept him from getting instantly absorbed in a text, be it an essay or poetry. A warm conversation with a friend also always did the trick. The feeling of loneliness was the biggest trigger to his anger. He had a strong desire to find a way to regularly evacuate his negative feelings so that they wouldn’t explode whenever a word, a remark or a situation hurt him. Anger had benefits to him, because it was a relief of tension, but he wished it wasn’t as strong as it had been, and he was working on that.

Using the Empathy map, we found way easier to fill the pains and gains section, but we did manage anyway to fill the other zones, as his descriptions had been so precise. An interesting problem that was highlighted by the “hearing” and “seeing” zones, for example, was that in the classes he gave on Zoom, he HEARD a sudden aggressive voice, and couldn’t SEE whose voice it was, but what he could SEE and reassured him, was comments on the Zoom conversation, of the other students defending him and saying his lesson was clear and there was no need to be aggressive towards him. However, we chose not to focus on that problem and I find the pains and gains zone way more interesting, because it transforms abstract problems into actionable solutions thanks to How Might We. The context zones of the Empathy Map seem to me to be a reflecting step, to formulate pains and gains with more ease.

My favorite quote, from the Jobs to be Done interview I talked about, was this one : “Godard said a very funny thing: “When you read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, there may be ten dead in the street, who cares, we’re reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina” (the quote is from France Culture’s radio show “Le Bon Plaisir” (May 1995))”. Seing that quote again, on the Empathy map, made us go with more certainty towards suggesting the user to read to feel better, in our app. This idea was very well received by other users, who were very excited by the idea to “discover a poem” when they were sad.

Godard reading Dostoïevski on a plane in his movie “Soigne ta droite”, 1986

Ideation

We did Crazy 8s with a group of 4 UX/UI designers (big thanks to Dahyun FIDEL, Morgane Lecouffe, Clémence Gueidan and Amina Ziane-Cherif), and we came out with a lot of ideas : mainly, to create a safe space where you can journal, unload, where you can track your mood, but also track your heartbeat and be warned when your stress level is too high, reminders to take care of your mental health… The most common idea was to create a “box” where all your self-care tips would be gathered, and that box would have to be easy to find when you are in a hard moment. Emergency buttons were also suggested but we chose to stay light and not go towards that path. Instead, we decided to create a future feature, easily accessible in the navigation bar : chat, call or take an appointment with a healthcare professional.

Moscow method for feature prioritization

Our Moscow method board on Mural

Since our project was an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we had to create two or three features, and think about which ones we would like to develop next. The Moscow Method consists in transforming the many ideas of the Crazy 8s into functionalities, while prioritizing them. You have to write them on a post-it and put them in the box: Must have, Should Have, Could have and Won’t have. The Won’t have box is important because it allows you to quickly reject an idea without deleting it, which allows you to move forward quickly, and to come back to it later if you realize it was a good idea. Our main feature is our pile of navy blue post-it notes: the creation or suggestion of comfort cards, gathered in a feed that is quickly accessible when you feel bad. It’s all about reminding the person experiencing a crisis of everything that helped them feel better in the past and could work again. Since each person is different, it was important that this feed would be customizable, through a selection during onboarding. Indeed, some users really like ASMR while others hate it. Some things that are comforting for one person, can surprise another person a lot and not help them at all. We all have our favorite quotes, or our favorite activities, the ones that get us back in shape without us even realizing it. But during an emotional crisis, most people become their own enemy and wait. A common point for all the interviewees was that it was very often an external factor that brought them out of a crisis: a loving gesture, reassuring words… A young woman told us how she needed her partner to make her understand that she was sadder than angry and that she needed to be comforted. It took a long time for her to realize that she actually needed to be comforted. It is very difficult for the person experiencing the crisis to take that step towards what would be good for him or her. Remembering this in a difficult moment is the key to shortening that moment and getting back to balance. It is this step back to well-being that we would like to facilitate with this feature.

A film extract that would probably make anyone feel better : the coffee scene in Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle.

Our second feature, in terms of importance, was the discharge journal. Several interviewees talked about how they would like to be able to discharge their too many emotions before reaching the breaking point where they get angry, or the point where they are suddenly overwhelmed with too much sadness. Confinement has greatly accentuated this phenomenon, as people have taken a lot out of themselves, without realizing all the frustration and pain that was building up inside them, discreetly and surreptitiously. It was only during certain government announcements, such as those of the extension of the confinement, that the emotions became known, but too powerfully and therefore painfully. One interviewee had found himself going around in circles at bedtime, shouting and making grand gestures, before going to bed dejected, and feeling better the next morning because he had thus evacuated his pain and anger. Another interviewee had woken up one morning in tears, unable to get up until the evening. He had just watched his thoughts swirl anxiously until, 8 hours later, he got up, went to the bathroom, watched a movie and resumed his normal life. Getting in motion helped him out of this state, which then quickly dissipated, probably because he had fully experienced his negative emotions instead of repressing them. None of the interviewees expressed a desire to avoid negative thoughts altogether. For them, they are part of life, they help them become aware of important things, and all they want is just that they wouldn’t be too brutal so as not to suddenly disrupt their daily lives. That’s why we thought of a well-known solution for them to become aware of their emotions: writing. Formulating their thoughts first of all helps to make them conscious, but also to help them understand what they need, what they don’t want, and why they feel what they feel. It helps to put order in a tormented mind, to then move forward. That’s why our feature is not just called “Journal”, but “Discharge Journal”.

The third feature, the emotional graph, is a mood tracker, as there are many others, but it seemed important to us that it would be present for this app to be complete and allow the user to take a step back on his emotional balance. It’s interesting to see when you’re on a negative slope, just as much as it’s important to be happy when you’ve managed to get better.

We have chosen the following ideas as future features:

- 5 things you’re grateful for: stating five reasons why they can feel grateful, even in very difficult situations, can get people out of a bad patch. It allows a change of perspective.

- 5 whys to an identified emotion: using the 5 whys method, which we used during the JTBD interviews, seems to be a good way to realize a deep introspection of oneself, and therefore, perhaps, to move forward.

- Chat with a professional: it seems important, for an app intended to be used in difficult, even very difficult times, to provide a simple, quick and even attractive way to talk to a mental health professional. We would even like to encourage some people to take the plunge and contact a psychologist when without this app, they might not have dared.

- Heartbeat tracker: Stress is a common sensation, but sometimes it rises without us noticing, and it would be nice to be warned when this is the case, for example, to think about doing some simple breathing exercises to bring the stress down.

User flow

Here is our user flow: