Sprout

Context

Designing a step by step process towards reaching health goals

In 2016, I had the opportunity to work for an upcoming social health and wellness engagement technology start-up and Nike+ Accelerator graduate, Sprout. Sprout is headquartered in Toronto with clients like McKinsey, Whole Foods, and Reebok and its products help employees be happier and healthier at work. During my term at Sprout, I had the opportunity to design many new features. One of my proudest accomplishments was designing the process of allowing employees to create personal goals for themselves since I learned it would be an integral part of helping users reach their goals and stay engaged with the platform.

The Problem

People need help scheduling when they should exercise

In the beginning of this project, I researched how other existing products help people reach their health goals. I discovered that most other health and fitness products will provide instructions on a variety of exercises that people canopen the app and use when they go to the gym. However, speaking with potential users about what they really need help with is not just access to exercise workouts but access to exercise workouts that are designed to address areas of their health they would like to improve as well as help with scheduling exactly when they should do those exercises.

The Goal

Create a means to work towards and track your health progress

On this project, I was tasked to design the end to end mobile experience of allowing employees to create a personal goal. The design needed to be able to accommodate for future projects, such as creating a company goal and department goal, that will utilize design patterns decided in this user flow. In terms of user experience, some of the goals that were set were having the user spend as little effort as possible when entering details for their personal goal.Another important goal that was intended for the final experience was to allow users have as much control as possible in what their personal goal was made up of; whether that be the type of exercise, start date, or personal goal photo.

My Role & Team

Establishing design patterns for future projects

On this project I was tasked as the sole designer to create our end to end mobile experience of allowing users to create a personal goal on our mobile application. I worked closely with our product design lead and our VP of product and engineering, providing updates on the design ensuring that we were in fact solving the user problem. Previously, before starting this project, the capabability of creating a personal goal already existed on the web platform, however, the initial design did not consider user experience a priority. Therefore, the intended outcome of this project was to improve the overall user experience of creating a personal goal on both mobile and web by utilizing the constraints of designing for mobile to inform a future redesign of the web experience.

Business Goals

Turning casual users into daily users

For this project two business goals were outlined as being the most important to keep in mind. The first was to focus on user engagement by encouraging users to come back to the app every day. This would be achieved by encouraging users to stay on track with their personal goal and note whenever they have completed an exercise that works towards one of their health goals. The next business goal was to optimize the design to get users to become more familiar with using the platform so that it would be easier to convince those users to use other parts of the application that are more visible to other users; such as posting on their feed.

User Goals

Empathizing with people who need help with their health

During the problem definition phase 2 user groups were identified to have different goals goals. First, there were people who already working towards their goals but needed help tracking their progress and, secondly, people who want to take control over their health but have no idea what steps they should take to achieve their health goals. Both of the user groups wanted help with their health and fitness so we therefore focused the design by considering the needs of these 2 user groups.

User Task Flow

Architecting a solution that integrates well and makes sense

At the beginning of most of my design projects I work on, before diving into figuring out how anything is going to be designed, I try to stay as low-fidelity until I have mapped out how each component of the solution will work with one another. I find this important when starting any project so I can easily make on the fly and can make sure the overall architecture of the project integrates well with the rest of the project. After several iterations, I concluded with the below user-task flow where I ended up with an optimal workflow that balances great user-experience while respecting the well-designed components already in use for parts of the existing application.

Experience Mapping

Establishing how all tasks will be interconnected

Given the complexity of having to organize the many possible tasks a user can perform as well as balancing how to best serve the needs of two very different user groups, I decided to map out all of the possible different user scenarios to ensure no possible tasks were ignored. With the diagram below, the resultant screen by performing a certain task is connected with a line.

Wireframing

Experimenting with different components to inform the optimal user experience

To ensure usability is prioritized, I generally next like to continue by designing the user interactions with wireframes. By wireframing showcasing screen layouts at their core of the For this challenge two business goals were outlined as being the most important to keep in mind. The first was to focus on user engagement by encouraging users to come back to the app every day. The next goal was to optimize the design to get users to share the recipe with others that may or may not be on the platform currently would be encouraged to use the application.

Final Design

Considering every use case, leaving no scenario left to chance

After finalizing how users will interact with each screen, I at a stage where I could final details to each screen. In the process of creating the final design and confirming the user experience with stakeholders within the company, I noted down the reasoning behind every design decision as shown under the mockups below. This can often be helpful when presenting the final design to others in the company so I can demonstrate which design possibilities I have already considered.