Home exercise app

How to design a mobile digital health care advisor to improve people’s health while working in front of a screen.

Company

This project was part of my studies at Hyper Island UX Design Upskill Program.

Role

I worked on this project by myself in the role of a product designer.

Responsibilities

Plan and conduct product design steps of user research, ideation, user tests, and prototyping.

Year

2022

About 8 weeks.

Final version

Design Overview

Company

Hyper Island is a digital creative business school with a consultancy side specializing in industry training using digital technology. It was founded in 1996 in Sweden and has a presence through offices or campuses in Sweden (Headquarters), Brazil, the UK, the US, and Singapore.

Problem

Our mission from Hyper Island was to create digital health care provider. I decided after some online research to create a health care provider for health issues related to bad ergonomics for people who work from home in front of the computer. This was during the pandemic, and I had read several articles about increased work pain related to working from home since people work sitting down for longer hours instead of walking to different meeting rooms. I wanted to create an app to assist when pain occurs and also aid to build better habits to prevent the pain from occurring.

Process

I started research of people working in front of a screen the majority of their time and experience pain from this. I conducted online research and interviews and concluded insights that I used to define the user needs, problems, and challenges. I used method such as

affinity diagramming, empathy map, user journey map, defined actionable problem statement: 'How might we assist people working from home to find exercises to immediate relieve them of their pain and support their longterm wellness when working in front of a screen? '

I ideated several solutions and decided on the one solution that most efficiently considered the main goal of helping the users manage their pain. I used the Hook model to describe a user's interactions with the product as they pass through four phases to make the product more valuable to the user. From this, I defined the product in a concept card, a user story including context, problem, interaction and change, a task flow, and a wireframe before continuing with an analog prototype that I sketched on paper. I used the app ‘Pop’, now called 'Marvel', to test with users.

After confirming the solution, I started with a grey-scale high-fidelity prototype in Figma. Before adding the colors, I conducted another user test to make sure I captured feedback on the function rather than on the color preferences. In this user test, I learned that the users appreciated how fast it was to go to the exercise, as the pain can change from day to day it is good to have a variety of options, and that it’s nice to know how long time each exercise is. I finally used the service 'Coolors' to select the color palette for the final prototype.

Insights

Throughout this journey, I learned to stay true to the purpose and focus on the core features that truly help the user group with their immediate problem and I grew a lot as a product designer. I see great future possibilities to add more features to the design to help the users get a more personalized experience and help them build healthier habits while working in front of a screen. After our ethics module at Hyper Island, I see possible improvements such as including more variety of age in the user tests to ensure the contrasts and size are easy to read for older age groups. Overall this was a really fun project and felt meaningful as many people work from home and experience pain from this.