Encouraging Healthy Lifestyle Choices With An Engaging User Experience

Please note: This was a concept project undertaken as part of the User Experience Design Immersive course and is in no way affiliated with Cosmopolitan Health Insurance.

Cosmopolitan Health is one of Ghana’s leading healthcare insurance organisations. Asides from being primarily an insurance outfit; they operate a wide variety of facilities and healthcare services, from gym and fitness centres to network of hospitals, and as a result are able to offer a connected healthcare provision.

The Brief

The setup for the brief was to design a digital product that would allow customers to book Cosmopolitan Health services, as well as providing a way for them to track their health and encourage them to make healthier lifestyle choices. The timescale for this design sprint was two weeks and was undertaken with two other designers: Adisa Ahmad and Kelvin Williams.

Contextual Inquiry

The first step we took was to familiarise ourselves with Cosmopolitan Health and the way the organisation operates.

From visiting a local Cosmopolitan Health centre, we learned that the integration of the fitness provisions along with their healthcare services was key to the company and their goals, and that the two are directly linked, physically, in order to facilitate customers making use of both services.

Competitive Analysis

Along with this we also reviewed the current health app offerings available on the market.

Of course, the healthcare app market is huge. There are thousands of apps to track and manage your health and fitness, with varying levels of effectiveness. However, we found there was no app that took advantage of Cosmopolitan Health’s unique integrated services approach to combine both an easy booking feature for medical appointments and fitness classes, together with the motivation to make use of them.

User Interviews

We identified our target demographic as those aged between 30 and 50 — people we suspected were most likely to use private healthcare services such as those offered by Cosmopolitan Health, but were restricted in terms of time and motivation when it comes to making positive changes to their health.

We conducted a series of interviews with 12 suitable users, and got insights.

What We learnt From User Interviews

• Life expectancy and quality of life are users’ primary motivators for being healthy.


• Users like automated measurements. They find manual data entry and constantly checking apps a bore.


• Users are motivated by being able to clearly see how they are improving.


• Booking an appointment when you need one is frustrating and time consuming — availability is uncertain.

Persona

Our persona for the project was Kwame — a 41 year old IT manager, who after 20 years working for corporate companies in a sedentary job has gradually put on a lot of weight.

Now that he’s a father and his kids are running around, he wants to lose the weight and get healthier so that he can keep up with them and be the best he can be for his family now and in the future.

So how can we make Kwame healthier?

Our Solution

The solution we came up is geared at helping the users do two things well:

• Make Healthier Choices via Habit-Forming Gamification.


• Book Medical/Health Appointments Easily.

1. Making Healthier Choices via Habit Forming Gamification

We based our new strategy around the idea of creating ‘Tiny Habits’ — small changes to your daily routine that you build on gradually in order to eventually make significant changes to your life, that you then stick to long term.

2. Booking Appointments

For us, the booking section seemed like something we could solve fairly easily by streamlining the process and reducing data entry to a minimum. You can see how we built up the designs for some of the screens below.

We designed a lightly gamified system of ‘health journeys’ that would guide users towards big changes in their lifestyle through small, manageable goals that initially fit seamlessly into their usual routine before gradually increasing into full sessions.

Next Steps

While we feel we have built the foundations of an effective framework to begin to improve people’s healthy habits, there is still much more that could be done.

A few points that we identified as potential ‘next steps’ for the app were:

• Develop a section for users to learn how to be more mindful with guided meditations and breathing exercises.


• Develop a ‘My Health’ screen that gives customers a fully detailed overview of their health and appointment results.


• Allow app users to tackle two or more journeys at the same time (eg. being more active and reducing stress).