Mobile
Vita Health Tracking
Digital health tracking using humanized data visualization.
My Role
Lead product design, illustration design and branding activities.
Timeline
July - Sept 2019
Introducing Vita
Focus on Holistic Health
Vita doesn’t just focus on one area of health, instead, it gives users an overview of various health factors - Vita connects to users’ Apple watch to gather their fitness and demographic data. It sets holistic health goals based on the optimal number for their age group in four categories: Sleep, Heart Rate, Exercise and Water Intake.
Humanizing Data
Vita gathers users’ health data and envisions our users’ health journeys as growing plants. Users get to see the whole picture of the holistic wellness with Vita.
Friendly Reminders
One of the main appeals of Vita is push notifications to send users reminders and tips based on their daily health data. Vita offers notifications two types of notifications in four different health categories. Each push notification sent to the user is personalized, using language that is encouraging and positive.
Customizable Notifications
Notifications are highly customizable and easy to turn off. Users customize the notifications they receive on a personal level. Options for frequency and type can be chosen.
It all began with two questions
In the start, all members of our team gathered together because of our shared passion for health and and wellness. With wellness being an important part of all of our lives, we understood deeply the struggles of of taking care of health, balancing health with other life responsibilities, and the ups and downs of engaging with health focused technology.
How might we create a product that is inclusive of all areas of health?
One of the biggest issues with the fitness industry at the time was that most products only cater towards one area of health. There is an array of measurements towards health and wellness. The definition of what is healthy is a highly subjective experience, and we want to address that with Vita. We want users to know that there are plenty of ways to be healthy beyond just what you eat.
How might we reframe the push notification experience?
Balancing taking care of our health with school and work is difficult, and we knew how hard it was. Sometimes all you need is a gentle reminder to take a break and take care of your health. However, push notifications can cause major inconveniences to users’ lives if done wrong. With that in mind, we sought to find out how we can create a more pleasant push notification experience.
User Research
In our initial user research, we collected qualitative data from users of health tracking applications in the form of user interviews. The interviews questions focused on motivation, likes and dislikes of their health tracking applications of choice, along with preferences regarding mobile push notifications. The user interviews were followed by screen recordings of users’ interaction patterns for their health tracking app of choice.
User Interviews
We conducted five user interview sessions with frequent users of fitness tracking applications where we asked general exploratory questions about their preferences and dislikes when it comes to fitness products.
Behavior Tracking
We asked our interviewed users to record their interaction with the preferred health tracking application for one day. We tracked users steps and time spent on each feature. We found that users don’t spend more than 2 minutes on the app and will return to the app up to 3 times during one day. Aside from looking at their daily progress, they spent a significant portion of their in-app time looking at the monthly progress and past data.
Project Goals
After going through the research phase of our project, we were able to derive 5 project goals to align Vita with our mission.
Create compassion and add emotional value.
Be transparent and informative about alerts and notifications.
Personalize messages to be relevant to individual user needs.
Branding
Me and another designer on our team engaged all team members together to collaborate on creating the Vita brand. Using symbolic metaphors and keywords, we established a growth focused brand image.
Vita Brand Values
We lead the entire team through a branding keywords exercise, we had all members come up with a list of keywords that they think represent the Vita brand, and we were able to note down all the similarities and eventually landed on the four terms below:
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Self-Love
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Compassion
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Guidance
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Humanization
Vita Plant
Our logo is a growing plant, which symbolizes the experience of health as a journey. No matter which stage you are, you are constantly growing. Everyone grows at different speeds and may take different twists and terms on the road to wellness, but it doesn’t matter as long as you are on the road.
“People may not always remember what you tell them, but they remember how you make them feel.”
Data Visualization Progression
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Initial Sketch
In the beginning, I teamed up with the data analyst on our team to sketch out different data models that could represent health data.
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Style and Shape Exploration
In both the first and second versions of designs, I experimented with different shapes and how to best represent health data.
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Final Data Visualization
After exploration, I eventually landed on a circular data display as it works best to show progression, along with incorporating specific illustration to show health category.
Style Guide
Project Redesign
Few months after demoing our project, I revisited the feedback our demo received and decided to improve upon the visual and interaction designs based to closer align with our initial product and design goals. Eventually, I landed on the designs I am currently displaying on my portfolio.
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Old Design
The designs we initially showed in our demo focused on displaying a friendly, bubbly brand to portray the idea of Vita being a “friend“. However, based on feedback, the initial styling failed to convey trust, and the handling of health data under the first approach seemed to be confusing to users.
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Design Updates
In the redesign, I took the previous user feedback and made changes to the original interaction and interface. I started off by eliminating extra steps to the user flow, then progressed to changing the core color palette. The new user interface goes for a minimalist calming design, with small splashes of color to highlight health data.