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VITA
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Timeline:
3 week sprint
Role:
Project Manager, UX/UI Designer, User Researcher, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Tools:
Miro, Figma, Zoom
VITA generates sustainable behavior change around healthy eating habits through gamification, behavioral science and boosting confidence.
Prevention is better than a cure.
Vita is a not-for-profit organization that wants to inspire and enable people everywhere to live free from chronic disease.
Did you know coronary heart disease is one of the top 5 causes of death for ages 25-85+?
Supported by studies and science, VITA knows the first step is to change what people eat and that prevention is better than a cure.
This change would be in the form of a plant based diet (not the same as veganism).
To help people eat better.
My team worked to create a digital solution that would help people eat better.
Our ambition was to create a solution that not only helped people start to eat healthier, but create sustainable behavior change in the long run.
Meet the team.
Kelvin (Me)
- Project Manager
- UX/UI Designer
- UX Researcher
- Group color picker
Eden
- UX/UI Designer
- UX Researcher
- Social Media Expert
- Pro Soccer Player
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Jasmine
- UX/UI Designer
- UX Research
- Prototyping
- Resident Foodie
Oscar
- User Interview Lead
- UX/UI Designer
- UX Research
- Silky Voiced Narrator
I collaborated with 3 other UX designers and I truly attribute our success to the teamwork we showed. I took up a project management role while still actively contributing as a UX/UI designer.
Where do we begin?
To tackle this broad and complex issue, we split our research into two components - market analysis and user interviews to better understand the context of this problem.
Market Analysis
User Interviews
See our research
- Australian trends
- Plant-based diets
- Behavioral research
- Competitors
- Comparative analysis
- Insights into current diets
- Motivations
- Pain points
- Preferences
- Specific behavior changes
Under 10% of Australians eat enough veggies.
Through our research, I found that 92% of Australians were not consuming the recommended serves of vegetables per day.
Figure 1: Prevalence of inadequate fruit and vegetable intake for persons aged 18 and over, 2017–18
We also honed in on the definition of a plant based diet. This one was quite difficult as there are many different definitions. We settled on a flexitarian diet, which gave people the freedom to incorporate small amounts of animal and dairy products into their diet.
aihw.gov.au
This was backed up by research into stricter plant based diets (veganism or vegetarianism) which led to a lack of B12 and iron respectively.
The flexitarian diet would allow both greater health benefits and greater flexibility, something that we could capitalize on when trying to help change behavior.
Organic Automation
A habit is a learned sequence of acts that have become automatic, unconscious responses to species cues and triggers
45%
Research suggests that 45% of the daily tasks that we undertake in a day are habitual
Habits make regular tasks automatic so we can process new and important information
Once we form these habits it is very hard to break them
How do we change behavior?
"Failure to use the new product was rarely due to disliking a product or finding it did not work properly; they simply forgot to use the products, and automatically continued or reverted to existing habits"
In order to change behaviors and form new habits for sustainable change, research suggests six key steps:
Ensure stable, supportive environment
(Essential)
Leverage context
(Good to have)
Make it easy
(Important)
Develop cues and rewards
(Important)
Practice and repeat
(Important)
Build meaning and motivation
(Good to have)
Remember when you could learn trigonometry? Me neither...
We found research to suggest that as we age, it becomes harder to learn and retain information as well as change our habits. As the deliverable was a digital solution, we decided to target a younger audience, able to more easily change their behavior.
Photo credit: Mentalfloss
Millennials aged 25-35, with their integration with technology, higher wealth than previous generations, large social networks and diverse world views presented us with a prime opportunity.
The average age of moving out in Australia is 23-25 and we can also capitalize on this life event to reinforce habits as per our behavioral research (leverage context)
Time to Talk to Users!
We interviewed 25 people from the ages of 25-75 to get a wide range of data from all ages. We also interviewed people with a wide range of diets, ranging from vegans to meat focused diets.
This would give us a broad range of qualitative data around the preferences/motivations/pain points around different diets. We sourced our participants through digital platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn to make sure we were targeting people who used such platforms in the first place.
Surveying the scene.
To support our interviews, we surveyed over 150 people around health and diet. What we found was:
Almost 1/4 said they knew a lot about a plant based diet but only 10% had the flexitarian definition - highlighting conflicting info out there
Over 65% of responses were between 18-35 - fitting into target market
"There's too much information out there, what can I trust?"
To break down all this information we created an affinity map
What we found:
01
Confused by all the information out there - therefore sticking to what was comfortable and saying they had no time
02
People said they were confident in the kitchen but were actually not confident in what or how to eat healthy
03
Food is social - a way to catch up with friends but also provided fears of different diets resulting in social rejection
04
Behavior and habit forming experiences almost exactly matched our theoretical research
Meet Riley.
Riley is our primary persona.
They are 25-35 years old, living in urban Australia with one roommate.
Enjoys cooking and eating great tasting food but due to busy lifestyle, eats what they know
Doesn't know much about health and finds all the information very confusing
Wants to eat healthier but does not like the idea of vegetarianism as they still want to hang out easily with friends
Meet Sam and Jordan.
As we had such a diverse and varied pool of research we were able to identify a secondary and tertiary persona.
Click here for more
"I have 5 kids and 2 jobs and I still have time to eat veggies"
We created our first problem statement, centered around time and convenience as we had an abundance of information about people being too busy.
Problem Statement 1.0
“Riley needs a convenient way to prepare healthy meals so they can live a fuller life”
However after a discussion with a primary stakeholder who told us “no one has **profanity** time. I have 5 kids and 2 jobs and I still have time to eat vegetables”, we decided to dig deeper and find the root cause of the issue.
Feeling tired after lunch?
We decided to go back to the drawing board and create two journey maps for Riley to compare a regular and healthy diet.
These were informed by our user interviews and I worked extensively to comb through and break down these insights to better inform how we pivoted.
Regular Diet
Hungry and no energy
Healthier Diet
There was a significant low point around lunch due to lack of energy and hunger
Confused and disappointed
When changing to a healthier diet, participants said they were more full and had more energy. The downturn was during shopping, cooking and eating unfamiliar recipes.
It was clear that this unfamiliarity was the real problem
Back on track!
Using the issue we identified in the journey map that I put together, we created our updated problem statement.
Problem Statement 2.0
“Riley needs to take the difficulty out of processing (learning) how to eat healthy so they can easily cook & eat healthy meals"
Unfamiliarity with healthy cooking and eating made Riley default back to what was familiar and easy when busy
It was clear we had to take the difficulty out of processing how to eat healthy so they could easily cook and eat better
How will we tackle this?
We split the problem into 3 different angles:
Education
Enjoyment
Simplicity
We conducted a series of ideation exercises as a team.
Click here to see what we did
We split these into statements to give us direction with ideation:
How might we...
Educate about healthy eating
Make eating healthy meals enjoyable to learn
Make learning simple instead of complicated
We voted on which idea we thought was the best through an MVP lens using miro.
We then plotted our ideas on an effort vs input graph for feature prioritization
But would users understand?
We created a very low-fi paper prototype to test if our solution would satisfy the basic function of helping users choose and cook a recipe.
We asked 5 participants to talk us through what they saw to experience what they understood in the moment
We found there were a lot of problems to do with the copy and lack of context, confusing users around:
- Rewards and in-app points
- Unlocked recipes at the end
Green light to proceed!
Now we knew that the basic function of our app worked, we could start fleshing out features and building a low fi prototype in Figma that gave more context and revised copy.
View Low-Fi video walkthrough
Prototype 2.0
Turn on your sound, hit play and listen to Oscar's silky voice as we take you on a tour of our solution.
High Fidelity Prototype.
I built a high fidelity prototype in Figma.
Feature breakdown.
Points and rewards
Points show which recipe is healthier and provides rewards for behavior. These can be used on prizes (coming soon) such as discounts at healthy plant based cafes
Gamification
A short quiz to educate users about healthy eating in an engaging way, with extra points for correct answers.
Modular Construction
An unfamiliar recipe can be created using lessons from previous recipes like Lego. Once a set of recipes have been cooked, unlock a new recipe. Users are shown that they actually do have the skills to cook new unfamiliar dishes
Search and card limit
All recipes are over 60% vegetables, giving users the freedom to search for anything (including meat) and still receive a plant based recipe, as we are promoting a flexitarian diet. Cards are limited to 5 for quick and easy decisions.
Sustainable solution
We created a gamified solution that also shows users they are building skills. By reminding users that they have the needed skills to cook new healthy dishes, we give them confidence that they lack.
As they become more confident, they will stop requiring our app.
Next steps in the road to 100 million
One of our business goals was to scale the program to 100 million users by 2025. I split this into a four step plan to build and grow our user base, starting with further usability testing.
Click here to see our roadmap
Phase 1:
Test new prototype with users and see how they react and understand our solution with more context. We can start populating the app with more recipes
Phase 2:
Develop reminder notifications for users to organize and eat at scheduled times. This consistency and repetition will help solidify their healthy eating habits.
Phase 3:
Enter into negotiations with third parties such as supermarkets to integrate convenience features such as add to cart directly from ingredients page. We would also enter into negotiations with plant based cafes to add to rewards.
Phase 4:
Introduction of social aspects similar to apps like Strava, where users are able to see progress of their friends and family. This starts to include social support and accountability to help form even better habits. This will be the last stage to boost users, but can only happen once there is enough traction as development and maintenance will be costly.
Learnings and takeaways.
This project was definitely a challenging one but also equally as rewarding. Health and diet was such a vast issue, it felt like we were looking up at Mt. Everest. However, every journey begins with a single step, and once we did, we felt unstoppable.
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Teamwork really makes the dream work
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Our active listening and clear communication was crucial to our success
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Especially important in a virtual environment
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Time/convenience is not a good enough reason and we need to dig deeper
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Why don't users have time
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I should eat more veggies if I want to live longer
Click for my deeper realisation
My single biggest takeaway from this project was the realisation of my own confirmation bias. For far too long I have thought of myself as rational and logical (something like spock from star trek) and confident in my ideas.
There was a point in the project where I realised that I was fighting for an idea that didn’t actually fit the problem well, simply because it was my idea and we had rolled with it for a couple of days. I had my moment of clarity when I asked myself why I was fighting so hard, and couldn’t find a convincing answer. I just had trouble letting go.
Once this was realised and I accepted that I wasn’t as rational as I once thought, I was able to see the flaws in the original idea, pointed out by my team. I am grateful for this, and I know this humbling lesson will make me an even better team player in the future.
Check back here soon for more progress.
I am currently testing and reiterating on VITA to create a better product.
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Usability testing of our mid-fi prototype
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Reiterating based on findings
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Further research - market analysis and user research