Case Study

User Engagement Concept for iOS Health App

Phase ONE: Understanding the situation

Conducting Desk, Quantitative and ‘Qualitative’ Research in Two Days

If you don’t know how to orient yourself in a problem space, you will never going to be able to find the solution. That is the reason why I never skip all three pillars of research fundamentals: Desk research, Quantitative research and Qualitative research. Given the strict time constraints of this project, I decided to conduct my research as follows:

Making the Blue-Sky Thinking Effective with the Insights

Every creative process needs effective editing process. The insights uncovered through research gave me the general idea of opportunity areas and what not to focus. Below are what I used as a guideline to guide my ideation phase.

Phase TWO

Ideate, Pitch and Get Feedbacks

After understanding the problem space and our target audience’s behavior, I moved on to ideating feature concepts. For this step, I time-boxed and came up with as many ideas as possible first. Then I performed a self-edit process to narrow down the ideas to three. In the end, I created a pitch one-pager for each concept and shared another survey to my online connections using Google Form.

Make the Decision and Start Running

Out of three concepts I tested, the idea called “Wellness Agenda” resonated the best with the survey participants. This concept was seen as the easiest to insert into people’s day-to-day lives. Also the user feedbacks on each idea pointed out to me what users typically find useful and useless from wellness apps in general.

Phase Three

Checking the Feel of the Idea with ‘Just Enough’ Prototyping

The idea that sounds good as bullet points of text could turn out to be a bust in actual execution. In order to avoid this from happening at the late stage of a project, I always test the concept in a full-flow as early as possible.

Phase Four

Refine

After the phase three, I submitted my project for the review. The feedbacks I received from the team pointed out that I fell short on demonstrating good UI design skills. They gave me additional 2 days to refine the UI.

These comments gave me good directions on where to focus on my refinement effort. Based on the feedbacks, I did a series of UI design studies. This steps allowed me to spend more time with the area that I was not able to invest in during the previous phase and gave me a chance to develop more cohesive UI proposal for the concept.

Phase FIVE

Demonstrating the connections between research insights, strategy and execution

The final step of the project was to demonstrating the refined UI. For this, I doubled down on showing the connection between all design decisions with learning from each phase of the project.

Conclusion

“What is the best action I can take to remove the unknown?”

When starting a new project, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of tasks that need to be completed within the time given. Someone might get an urge to start fiddling with screen design right away, but it is important to remember that taking the time to think about the best action to reduce the amount of unknowns I have in the project often results in faster execution.This project reminded me of the importance of scrappy user research, rapid prototyping and iterative design process.