At its core, Vytality Health is a “co-caring” social community app that provides reliable, authentic support while improving well being and positive healthy social behaviors. How does it do this?

• By posting a goal, task, mood or wisdom note that appears on friends’ timelines which encourages engagement, creates a sense of belonging, and provides emotional and physical support

  • Every post type brings a unique experience to the individual in need, e.g. when creating a goal “read 20 books by the end of this year,” the user is able to set a reminder, and control the privacy of the post- Vytality Health encourages users to post goals publicly as the trusted social community provides accountability and support in achieving goals.

DESIGN CHALLENGES

Vytality Health wanted us to:

1) Conduct user validation research

2) Build the foundation on how people support their own and other's goals.

STYLE GUIDE

Who are the competitors?

To get a better understanding of what is already out there in terms of caring apps, we turned to our competitors and analyzed their features. We looked into Lotsa Helping Hands, Carely, Kinto and Caregivers in the Community.

Keeping in mind that this app is a social community app, we compared features from other social apps to get an idea of what features would enhance the social community experience for our users. We looked into Instagram, Facebook, OkCupid, and Rover.

USER INTERVIEWS & FINDINGS

Our client provided us with a list of people we could interview but the target user type was too general. After conducting a total of 13 in-depth user interviews and 7 surveys (for both quantitative and qualitative data), we were able to put the target users in two categories: Caregivers and Care-receivers.

Once all the data was gathered, we proceeded to affinity map to uncover the patterns and trends from our users. We were finally able to discover their pain points, challenges and delights.

PERSONAS

Once we gathered these insights into what our users felt about caregiving and care-receiving, I was able to create three personas for the target audience. Our primary persona is Henry who is the caregiver, the second is Omari who is the care-receiver, and third is Jennifer who is both the caregiver and care-receiver. The unique story and background of all three personas are a direct reflection of the users we interviewed and surveyed.

SKETCHES

Before diving deep into Sketch to begin wireframing, we decided to brainstorm ideas on different user flows and sketch out some ideas. The user flows we focused on were: Creating a post, messaging a match and sending a reaction. After consulting with our client, we decided it was best to focus on the first two user flows and scrap the idea of adding reactions. Additionally, considering multiple ways to accomplish the same task, we also looked into creating another version of the user flow of messaging-a-match to test with our users.

WIREFRAMES

Even though our scope of project was to deliver either low fidelity or medium fidelity wireframes, we went above and beyond by producing a high fidelity wireframe as well as a visual composition. The low and medium fidelity wireframes went through multiple rounds of testing through each user flow.

ITERATIONS

Iterations are never simple as they require a great length of detail and are often the “meaty” part of the UX Design process, however, they are the most useful when explaining design decisions. Below are some of the major iterations that I noted throughout our journey.

Any noticeable progression through wireframes should and must always be explained through usability testing. Why? It’s all about the users satisfaction. We had 13 users test out our prototypes and asked them to express their thoughts during the process. While we jotted down their vocal thoughts, we paid particular attention on their body language as well to notice signs of delight, confusion, surprise, and so forth. The usability testing proved successful in all rounds and I was able to explain our iterations to our client with rock-solid and detailed evidence (see below the Iterations).

Our final prototype to our client was the high fidelity prototype, not the visual composition. Access below the InVision link to test out the prototype yourself!

Each and every step of the way, we encountered many “aha” moments and made sure to convey them to our client. Below is a list of those “aha” moments turned into next steps that involve innovative and fun additions for Vytality Health:

• Develop the care-receivers profile and their user flows to see their journey

• Because many care-receivers are not tech-savvy, we recommended creating an option for caregivers to manage profiles of care-receivers with their permission

• Create an accessible version of interface for users that need larger text to read, microphone ability in each flow that involves writing, and more

• Have Vytality Health provide a Certification of Trust to caregivers to be “verified” for care-giving

• Build a Matching system on: location, profile details, time of availability, and types of posts made over time

• Add a feature on the home/feed page that would let the user filter what kind of posts he/she wants to see and from who vs. seeing all public posts

• Within settings for editing profile, create a lock feature which lets user lock private information that he/she would not like to share with everyone (e.g.: age, location, etc.)

• Caregivers receive “care points/hearts” for each time they complete a task for their care-receivers and this puts them at the “top” of list to be a caregiver

In 16 days, my team and I were able to accomplish a lot more than we imagined as we ran through the UX design cycle. Our client was absolutely delighted with our work and excited to ship our design for the December 2018 MVP launch.