INTRODUCTION
This is a project that aims to help with healthy lifestyle habit formation and attitude transformation towards the definition of Health. To prevent our users from having psychological reactance, we incorporated a series of persuasive theories in our concept iteration process. Our final design is a product that achieves its transformational goals through gamification.
This project lasted 8 weeks from October - December 2019.
MY ROLE
Project Manager
UX Designer
UI Designer
Interaction Designer
SKILLS
User Research
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
App Design
TEAM
June Byeon
Annette Hong
Ally Liu
June Liu
Se One Park
Melissa Shi
Product Overview
CortiBot is a habit formation product designed to transform our users' definition of what being healthy is from being physically fitted to having a balanced lifestyle and cortisol level. Main features of this app includes a virtual pet service, to-do list, inbox, dashboards, and profile.
01
PARING WITH EXISTING FITNESS DEVICE
To avoid the need of our users purchasing a new fitness tracking device, we designed our product so that it could be connected and synced with an existing device. Due to the limitations of existing devices, an external piece will attached to the tracking device to assess users cortisol level.
​
A customized digital robot will be paired with the users based on their current health level.
02
GAMIFICATION OF THE HABIT FORMATION PROCESS
To make the process of habit formation engaging and obfuscate the design goal, the process is gamified. When taking actions that help with raising the digital robots, the users are actually building healthy habits for themselves.
03
GRADUAL DISCLOSURE OF EDUCATIONAL PIECES
_gif.gif)
Making the app more engaging, an element of challenge is introduced. Dashboards with users' fitness information is only unlocked by completing given tasks.The tasks to complete is also challenging in that they require users to do more than sweeping of fingers.
04
GRADUAL DISCLOSURE OF EDUCATIONAL PIECES
Educational pieces about the importance of balanced cortisol level and its relevance to being healthy is revealed to users gradually. This is to prevent the possibility of users feel repelled with overwhelming info and to keep users engaged.
05
GRADUAL DISCLOSURE OF EDUCATIONAL PIECES
To obfuscate the purpose of the product, metaphor is used to disguise the healthy habit formation process as a digital pet raising game. Each component of the healthy life is phrased as a need of the robot.
The Solution
00
User Research
01
Discovering the Problem
Interviews were conducted to understand how people view health, if there is a need to transform user behavior and attitude, and how they utilize technology in accessing their health.
A
" I feel healthy today because I am in a good mood and my body feels alright."
" I feel like I have lived a healthy day when I accomplish the daily goals on my app."
B
C
" I know it doesn't apply to everyone, but when I lose weight, I know my body is at a healthier state."
From our interview, we realized that there is a common misconception of what is being healthy. Many people believe that their physical appearance or at-the-moment physical/emotional condition is an accurate measurement of their health. However, our hormone level is a better measurement of our health condition. But little do people know how hormone affects health,
Project Objective
To design an intervention that transforms users' attitude on health from only consider their external appearance to having a balance hormone levels as well as helping them build habitats that leads to balanced hormone levels.
Tech Research
02
Defining the Possibility
We mainly looked in to two different areas. First is at what types of hormone tracking technology is available that is also capable of giving real-time testing results and is small enough to be wearable. Second is at what types of healthy habit formation app are already in the market.
After comparison, we realize that currently, there is no product on the market where hormone can be tracked at real-time. All the existing hormone testing devices are also low in mobility. However, we did find that there are developing technology that we can utilize in our design to attain our hormone tracking goal.
Concept Ideation
03
Journey to Finding the Solution
Personas
We created personas of our targeted user based on our interview participants to provide a point of reference during our ideation and evaluation process. We targeted at mainly two category of users. The first category consists of young adults who are time and financially restricted. The second category consists of middle age users who finds new habit adaption difficult.
Paper Prototype
For initial concept ideation, we decided to diverse as much as possible. Therefore, we separated and came up with 3 individual concepts that all serve the purpose of triggering user action taking.
Gamification Approach
.jpg)
Participants in general loved the idea of taking care of another avatar, however, they felt less emotional bonding with a digital avatar because there was not much direct communication between them and the avatar.
Data Visualization Approach
.jpg)
.jpg)
The data visualization approach was widely received by the testing participants because they appreciated being able to visualization their progress.
Physical Interaction Approach
Having a physical robot on interact with received much positive feedback from user testing participant because of the strong emotional connection this builds. However, there was a high concern of having too many objects to keep track of.
!
Semantics for tasks were unclear to users.
!
It was hard to form strong emotional connection with an digital avatar.
Low-Fi Prototype
To solve the two major problems arose from our initial prototype, we made several modifications to our second iteration. To foster a stronger emotional connection between user and robot, their is a paring step added to robot assignment. This is to make the user to feel like the robot is unique to him/her. The second major change that we did was to change the phrasing of the task prompt so that it clearly indicates to the user how to complete the task. After our second user testing session, more design flaws were discovered.
!
Iconography is confusing.
!
The tasks for users to complete are not engaging.
Mid-Fi Prototype
With the mid fidelity prototype, we collectively decided that it is necessary to map out all the desired features of the app and produce a semi-functional full prototype with InVision. The biggest change in terms of the design is the incorporation of educational materials that educated the user of the importance of having healthy habits and how that affects the internal cortisol balance of body.
Robot Matching Screens
Feature Walkthrough
.png)
.png)
Task Completion Screens
Educational Material
!
Room to enhance users' emotional attachment to their robots.
!
Educational information is not well integrated into the app.
Final Design
The End Solution
04
Design Details
The final design utilized many persuasive techniques to achieve the ultimate goal of transforming users' understanding of health and assisting them with forming healthy lifestyles. These techniques includes utilizing distancing to obfuscate the design intention, gamifying the app to increase user motivation, and fostering environment for repeat actions to help form new habits.
Auto robot pair
To foster a stronger emotional connection between the user and the robot, individual's robot is generated based on their personal information collected from their existing health track app.
Healthier you healthier robot
Paired digital robot reflects the health condition of the user. The healthier the user to happier the robot.
Actionable prompt of actions
From our literature review, we learned that the one of the key factor of successful habit formation is to give clear and actionable instructions on how to perform a new action.
Real-time tracking
To avoid reactance towards concept of being persuaded, all traced physical attributes of the user are being disguised as the robot attributes.
Oil = Hydration
Battery = Sleep
Gear = Activity
??? = Cortisol
* Switch from ??? to Cort. after reaching to appropriate level.
Leveling system
To maintain motivation for users to stay using, a leveling system is included. Only after user has leveled up to a appropriate level through performing the prompted actions will they be able to unlock further features.
Onboarding Screen Map
Device Paring
App Walk-through
Initiation
Inbox
Return User Screen Map
Task List
Tracking Dashboard
Dashboard Unlock Screen Map
Dashboard Unlock
