Your Daily
Redesigning a subscription based wellness app to improve user retention.
Role:
Lead UX Researcher​​​
Teammates:
Erica Congemi, Lead UX Designer
Regina Mohan, Project Manager
Anita Trinh, Information Architect​​
Timeline: 5 weeks
Practicing healthy habits as a lifestyle
About Your Daily
The creator of Your Daily has dealt with autoimmune and gut health issues for years and has developed this daily health coaching app in order to help others with similar issues find a way to be consistent with their health and wellness routines.
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Your Daily implements an onboarding assessment to best customize the health education tracks for users and supplies them with various mental and physical health resources such as daily lessons and affirmations.
The Objective
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Our client wishes to improve user retention and organization of the site for future features.
My Goals
Improve user retention through increased interactivity and "gamification" thus promoting more stickiness throughout the app.
Enhance user experience with increased encouragement, improved UI, and a more intuitive flow while keeping the current design system.
Conduct user research to validate current design choices and implement necessary changes to enhance user experience.
Common "must haves" in the health and wellness space
Our market research showed that other wellness education apps employ similar features to engage and retain users that YourDaily does not currently have.
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What do users need?
We conducted user interviews with users that use Your Daily or similar apps and that suffer from health issues to find out what they look for to help them along their health journey.
Through an affinity map, we found the following needs:
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“I like getting external encouragement and education.”
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"I like things to be accessible and visually pleasing so I can easily track my progress."
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​“I need a way to quickly track my health and create consistent routines to be successful.
Through usability testing of the original site, we were able to validate current design decisions and understand user needs:
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Users prefer shorter activities and lessons as they have limited time.
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Users appreciate the current journaling tool.
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User feel a lack of community and would like a feature to speak to others.
Meet Kate
We used the information from our user interviews to create a persona, Kate.
Kate is an entrepreneur and opened up a restaurant with her husband recently. She loves pouring her heart into her business but has noticed her anxiety and fatigue getting much worse due to a recently diagnosed autoimmune disorder caused by stress. She has read that prioritizing a routine to manage her stress can greatly reduce her symptoms. Kate downloaded Your Daily 2 weeks ago in hopes to stick to a routine and enjoys the app but needs help staying motivated to use it more regularly.
Goals:
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See results in her stress level and overall health
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Keep a routine
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Feel motivated and encouraged
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Feel supported by others like her​
Frustrations:
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Unclear what resources are available
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It’s difficult to find her favorite features, like journaling
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Unsure of what her long term health path looks like
What is the current experience on Your Daily?
Our team created a user flow to understand Kate's current experience.
The current user flow shows that there are multiple redundancies, highlighted in the red boxes, in YourDaily's flow that leads to confusion when searching for the intended tool.
The current journey map shows that Kate becomes less motivated as she uses the app. She is less likely to return due to the lack of external encouragement and difficulty finding her journaling tool.
Creating support for users
Based on our user research and client requests, our team composed a list of ideas to improve user retention and create a more supportive app.
We chose to focus on the following changes:
Create a task tracker and external encouragements to promote consistency and so users feel motivated in their progress.
Personalize UI to users through improved visuals to entice and encourage users to maintain a routine.
Visually represent users lesson progress to provide clarity, organization, and a sense of achievement.
Improve information architecture and menu layout to reduce redundancies and create an intuitive user flow.
Mid Fidelity Prototype
Per client request, we kept the current design system and colors that Your Daily utilizes.
In our mid-fidelity prototype, we implemented the following features to address the pain points discovered in our user research:​​​​​​​​​​
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User Personalization
Motivational streaks
Frequently used tools on home page for easy access
Course progress bar
Completion and time requirement visuals for lessons
Customizable checklist for personibility and encouragement​​
Central in progress and completed lessons
Achievements visualized as badges
Activity calendar
Encouragement pop ups after task completion
How did the users feel?
We conducted user testing using the following prompts:
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You would like to journal. Show me how you would do that.
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You are looking for a new smoothie recipe. Show me how you would do that.
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You have completed your daily lesson and would like to track how far into the module you are. Show me how you would do that.
Prompt 1
Journaling was easier to find
Result: All users were successful in completing the task in less than 30 seconds with less than two errors.
Takeaways: Users appreciated having the journal resource on the home page. They enjoyed receiving personalized prompts based on the emotions they were prompted to input.
​Prompt 2
Additional resources were confusing
Result: Users were confused on what resources were available and had difficulty knowing where to find them.
Takeaways: A filter should be added at the top of the explore page to better clarify available resources. The visual load should also be decreased to further clarify.
​Prompt 3
Tasks felt cluttered and confusing
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Result: Users enjoyed the achievements page but found the task page difficult to understand
Takeaways: Visual hierarchy needs to be improved on task pages by decluttering and streamlining progress visuals. ​​​​​​​​​​​​
Additional findings:
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Users thought pop up encouragements were advertisements upon first glance.
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Users enjoyed both "Task" pages, but voiced a preference for the achievements page ​as they felt more motivated by it.​
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Users really appreciated the added ability to journal within the app.
Clarifying and streamlining for an improved experience
Taking into account the feedback from usability testing, we made the following changes to the high fidelity prototype.
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Change progress bars to rings for visual clarity and hierarchy.
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Restructure the favorites feature and simplify task list to improve visual hierarchy on "Task" page.
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Default "Achievements" page instead of "Tasks" to increase motivation.
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Add filters at top of "Explore" page for clarity.
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Make pop up encouragements full screen to decrease confusion with advertisements.
Outcomes
System Usability Scale (SUS) Scores increased by over 5 points with our changes. Overall, users had a more pleasant experience and were able to perform their tasks in less time and with minimal errors.
Next steps
We presented the high fidelity prototype to the client and we received great feedback on features they would implement in the future and room to grow. If given the opportunity and time, I would like to iterate on the following:
Develop a page to be able to purchase sponsored products. The client had a future feature of purchasing products in app but due to time constraints we were not able to prioritize this.
Test out bottom navigation. In our final meeting, our client expressed having an affinity for a bottom nav bar over a sliding tab and in the future I believe this could benefit users ability to visualize resources.
Design and test a community feature to give users a space to connect. We were told that this feature was in progress on our clients end and to not include it in our designs.
Reflections
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An anonymous form can go a long way - Our client provided us with a list of current and previous users of the app. We sent out a mass email with a link to a google form to answer a few questions about YourDaily as well as a question about if they would like to be contacted to do a full user interview. Almost no one wanted to be interviewed but we did get meaningful data from users filling out the questionnaire.
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Time management - Working on different projects can be strenuous at times and requires the skills of project management and prioritization.
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Not everything can be fixed - The onboarding process for this app was something we all would have loved to get user feedback on and iterate but our client said it was off the table. It was frustrating but we had to put our clients ask's first.