Holistic Wellness App

An app to help individuals manage and improve their holistic wellness, including physical and mental wellness, financial wellness, and environmental wellness (their impact on the environment).


The Problem

The client had developed the concept of a holistic wellness app, which would reflect your overall wellness as a single "score", but was not sure how exactly to construct the score to make it meaningful and reflective of the type of slow-and-steady behaviour change they wanted to target. Additionally, there was a high degree of uncertainty around the approach to take to actually provoke and maintain positive behaviour change, with some members of the client team feeling the score would be sufficient, while others felt a more explicit cycle of activities and responses needed to be included.

How might we support long-term and lasting behaviour change around personal wellness behaviours?
How might we make a single-number representation of wellness meaningful for people?

How my Team and I helped

User Experience Research

To lay the groundwork for designing a product that would support long-term behaviour change, we began with a substantial secondary research phase. In this phase, we  explored different theories of behaviour change, and defined a structural model that our designs would need to map to in order to have a high likelihood of achieving it.

Product Strategy & Concept Design

Beyond the core concept of measuring wellness holistically, the product itself was largely undefined. We used a variety of techniques to help break down this core concept and explore different approaches to drive positive behaviour change across those wellness areas in accordance with the structural model we developed in the research phase.

We also helped the client prioritize the components of the product to ensure that early testing was providing valuable feedback about the most critical and risky elements earlier on, to avoid unnecessary design and development costs.

Interaction Design & prototyping

On the basis of the prioritized design components, we developed a flexible collection of interaction patterns for the product, and rapidly prototyped a number of different interfaces for the product.

MVP Launch & Field Research

In addition to the design and development of the product, we had initially intended to participate in a series of "MVP"-based controlled product launches, with an emphasis on detailed research to improve subsequent versions of the product. We designed a rigorous mixed-methods research plan incorporating observational research, ethnographic inquiry, behavioural metric tracking, and attitudinal surveys. 

As a result of changing client needs, we were able to develop a smaller, more tactical research plan using this initial research program to lay out a framework for the client to use in the future to continue testing the product.