Case study: How an app can help reduce chronic illness one broccoli at a time
By: Aimee Mcbride
Tags: Ux Case Study, Ux Writing, UX Design, UX Research, Case Study

Case study: How an app can help reduce chronic illness one broccoli at a time Aimee McBride Follow Apr 25 · 12 min read

Image by PJ Calhoun: A mockup of the high-fidelity prototype we made for Vita. See the full prototype here VITA.

Vita in 15 seconds

Vita is a scalable app designed to reduce chronic illness by encouraging users to adopt a plant-based diet

It makes healthy eating fun and engaging by encouraging users to track habits and celebrate achievements

Vita is different from other diet or food apps because it helps users understand what and why they eat

Team: PJ Calhoun, Aimee McBride, Darcy Meehan, and Yuna Miyoshi

Time: 2-week sprint

Tools: Figma, Google Drive, Miro, Otter, Social Media, Slack, Trello, Zoom (this project was run virtually)

Research shows us that 4.9 million Australians 18 and over have two or more chronic diseases — and that’s a problem

Are you Australian, 18+, and living with a chronic illness?

If the answer is yes, you might have a few things in common with the target users of Vita — Aussie women between 30-45 years of age who have a chronic illness and a strong desire to improve their health — or maybe you know someone just like them?

Without going into too much detail about how we came to identify our target user — hint, it’s where our business and user goals crossed over, I want to talk a little bit more about my role in this project.

How are we going to do this all on Zoom? My role project managing in COVID

Vita was a two-week sprint that tested our teamwork as much as our research or design skills.

I was responsible for project management and shared responsibilities around research, design, and writing.

Keen to apply a strategic lens to our work to differentiate us from other groups, I also tried to make sure that we were mindful of the business and user goals in our design.

This project was challenging — there’s only so much a Trello board, ice breaker games, and daily stand-ups, or sit-downs in our case, can do — and this was made more difficult by the fact that we did everything online.

I’m proud to say we met our deliverables, moving through our double-diamond multiple times, and delivered a well-researched high-fidelity prototype and polished presentation.

Is our MVP perfect? That’s a hard no but the design, research, and teamwork that went into it made it a great experience.

Plus, we’re quickly becoming experts in conducting group projects online. (For reference, tools we used, include: Figma, Google Docs, Google Slides, Miro, Slack, Social Media, Trello, Zoom.)

Diving deep into research: the ‘how’

Our project was organised into two phases: research and design and followed the double-diamond framework.

Reverse brief and double-diamond

We unpacked the ‘how,’ or process, of this project by starting with a reverse brief — identifying deliverables, confirming timelines, and working out how to best work with each other.

Later, we applied the double-diamond framework to our project plan — dividing our work into clear stages, namely, research and design.

Here, we made an important decision about our research.

Testing assumptions: research plan and discussion guide

We don’t just want to know what people are eating — we want to know why.

Our assumption was that if we can understand whether people are eating to feel happy, or relieve stress, or share an experience then we have a better chance of understanding the impulses driving their behaviour.

To understand what and why people eat we needed a plan. So, we moved our conversation from Slack and Zoom to Google docs — creating a research plan and discussion guide that in practice looked like this:

3 rounds of interviews, speaking to 34 users Secondary research: market, competitor, and comparative analysis as well as research into behavioural science, sociology of eating, habits, and BIG food

Our objective was: to identify and understand the personal habits and social factors that influence how people eat.

And the methods we used included: competitor analysis, comparative analysis, market research, behavioural science research, sociological research and food industry research.

We divided the research up between us — I have already spent five years at university working on social research and ten in industry analysing customer research and metrics, so I felt confident moving into this phase of the project.

Market research and analysis

We were able to use our secondary research to assign meaning to our insights, weigh their value and determine where they fit in the broader food puzzle.

Here, we learnt that:

Food is a billion-dollar industry that influences advertising, health policy, and more

Aussies want to eat more fruit and veggies but they’re time poor and often prioritise convenience

Aussie women are more likely than men to try a diet, make lifestyle changes, buy and prepare food

Importantly, we also learnt that there are a lot of different apps, websites, subscription, and food delivery services vying for our user attention.

You might recognise these brands? Maybe you’ve even used some of them. So, you already know the food-health market is crowded.

And while we didn’t want our app to be the next Weight Watchers or MyFitnessPal, we did use these services to help benchmark features users are expecting such as food tracking, recipe content, and progress reporting.

We identified new opportunities — if everyone is doing the same thing, but we know that 84% of women who go on a diet fail in less than 12 months and the average woman spends 31 years of her life dieting, then maybe they’re doing it wrong?

But what I wasn’t ready for was the sheer volume of insights we got from our user interviews — or that so many people would respond to my online requests for interviews.

We went beyond our own social networks to recruit users, finding interview participants on slack, Facebook, Reddit — and wherever we could find them.

In round one, we used guerilla interviews to help us set parameters around who our target user might be and focus our secondary research.

In the second round, we went more in-depth to test assumptions and gather better insights, adding questions in specific subject areas such as food preparation and meal planning, habits, challenges, and motivations.

In the final third round, we interviewed people who we felt were more likely to be our target users learning more about what and why they eat.

Affinity mapping, and our teammate Yuna, helped us turn interviews into insights.

Above is a small part of our affinity map, you can view the larger map here.

Applying a strategic lens to our research

While diet and food apps are based on a calories-in/calories-out tracking model, businesses in the media — think Instagram — lifestyle and education space like Headspace and Duolingo, focus on building habits to keep users engaged and modify their behaviour.

With this in mind, our comparative research honed in on the cue, routine, and reward mechanisms these digital products use to encourage new habits.

“…a habit is the routine you take when a cue is presented. Then, the reward you gained afterward strengthens the association between the relationship between the cue and the routine.” — The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

If the best way to get our users eating better and on the Vita program is to change their habits, we need to make this the core of our app. But how …

We can’t immediately change our culture, environment or advertising spend BUT we can educate, support, and encourage — rewarding users when they build routines in line with the goals of plant-based eating.

We can set them up for success and reach our business goals — and the best part is we can do it digitally.

Aussie women between 30–45 who have a chronic illness a strong desire to improve their health are our low-hanging fruit. (That’s roughly 1.5 million potential early adopters.)

At this point, I would like to refer back to our business goal of 100 million users by 2025. That’s a big goal but we can reach it if we start by carving out our own niche. So, who is our low-hanging fruit?

Our research shows Aussie women with a chronic illness and a strong desire to improve their health — are a motivated group and that if we can get this group on board, they will get everyone in their social circle on board too.

Becoming Vita evangelists just at the time we need to scale.

Lottie wants to reduce or reverse her chronic illness by changing her diet — she’s our Vita evangelist. Drawing by Darcy Meehan.

Lottie wasn’t the only user we identified though. So why did we target her and not Rain, Jane or Emma?

Each of the persons listed represents a mental model that could benefit from a plant-based eating program, however, the persona that is most likely to successfully bring together our business goals, user insights, and research is Lottie.

As you can see on our empathy map, Lottie is our low-hanging fruit.

Over the years her thinking has shifted, from diets to lifestyle, and she is in the market for an eating program that will help her change her habits, helping her eat well to be well.

So, what problem can we help Lottie solve that will have the most impact on her, while also keeping in mind our business goals?

Problem statement: Lottie needs a way to foster good habits so that she can improve her health.

Phase two: Design

In our next team meeting, we kicked off the design phase of the project, with How Might We statements.

We wrote our ideas down in a shared document hosted on Goggle Drive and then voted on what we felt were the most appropriate statements i.e. the ones listed below.

Namely, ‘How Might We:’

help Lottie feel in control of her illness so that it doesn’t overwhelm her?

make managing her health more enjoyable?

make plant-based eating more appealing?

Crazy 8s design workshop

We started ideating using the Crazy8s method, pitching our worst ideas first — to get the creative juices flowing- and then our best eight solutions in under 6 minutes.

After tacking screenshots of our designs, we posted them on Miro so everyone could see each other's ideas and assigned ourselves three post-its each to start voting.

Although this exercise resulted in many ideas we couldn’t use, it led us to some really solid and viable solutions.

After we shared our ideas, we each voted on the features we thought were most effective in meeting our users' needs — this was really important, as a team who hadn’t worked together with very different personalities, we need a fast and inclusive way to make decisions and voting did this for us.

Prioritising features: Storyboards, card sorts, and journey maps

This is Lottie’s story. Lottie has tried various diets in the past but struggles to see results when she comes across our VITA app to try it out.

Lottie is someone who seeks data and first-hand experiences before she tries something out, therefore, we need to:

Provide scientific data behind the benefits of plant-based eating and testimonials to provide further credibility

Although she is keen to try out new diets, she is also concerned if she can maintain a lifestyle change.

So, offering her different tiers and levels of strictness would give her a sense of choice and personalisation

She enjoys keeping track of her diet but feels discouraged when she is unable to keep it up.

We can track her progress and providing positive reinforcement would encourage her to keep going

She loves hanging out with her friends and family but from research, we learnt that eating habits are highly influenced by social environments.

A way to connect with fellow plant-based people through social networks and a feature to invite a friend along the journey were also important to include

Storyboard by Yuna Miyoshi

While Yuna was finishing up our storyboard and sharing it in Miro, I completed a card sorting session to ensure we grouped and categorised content in a way that made sense to our users.

Sitemap

The results of the card sorting were then turned into a task flow, outlining how Lottie will work through our basic site map.