Vita

The Challenge

We were trying to find a solution that could help VITA to create a platform where the company would be able to offer its services to more people and reach those who want to improve their lifestyle and diet in order to reduce their risk of contracting serious chronic diseases.

The Solution

As a result, we developed a feature that could help users to swap any “unhealthy” product that has been part of their diet for a healthier version of them, with the option to find recipes and all the extra benefits that they could have from the consumption of that “new'' healthier choice. The main purpose of this feature is to create progressive changes in customers' behaviours towards a healthier, sustainable and more responsible lifestyle.

Roles & Responsibilities

The project had one project manager overviewing the whole process. However, it was divided into the four different phases of the double diamond process (Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver). Each member of the group supervised one step of the process (I was in charge of the discovery phase) with the rest of the members involved in all the steps and decisions through the whole project.

We decided to do it this way as we considered it to be the best method for us to keep growing in our learning process.

Users & Audience

We started the discovery phase analysing some of the primary competitors to have a better idea of who would be part of our target. 

Firstly we started with a competitive analysis where we took four different websites from companies with similar business profiles to Vita. We chose those companies because their mission, vision and approach about how to improve people’s lives were very similar to Vita. Those companies were:

- Omada

- Diversify Dietetics

- Stuff That Works

- 28 By Sam

We chose the main and most common features that a platform like these ones should have in order to help users to have a good experience. Those features were:

Design | Images | Search | Filters | Professional Support | About | Reviews | Contact | Resources | Blog | Privacy | Customisation (of the experience)

We decided to give each of these features a simple qualification like “great”, “average” and “poor” that could help us to identify the different strengths and weaknesses between them. Overall, all of them have great features. However, most of them have “poor” developed features like:

Search | Filters | Blog | Customisation (of the experience)

This part of the process helped us to have a better understanding of the market and the advantages that Vita could have if we can take into consideration the weak points from the different competitors. But the information collected wasn’t enough to provide a clear idea about the possible users. It was just to understand what kind of features and tools Vita needs to offer in its platform.

After this research we thought that if a user can have this kind of service on their mobile as an interactive platform, it could be more useful for them to keep tracking their status and advances with the different features available within the service. It was a strong point to take into consideration and it brought up the assumption that a platform like this would be more suitable to have it as an app. The users could be in contact with the company all the time and track their progress.

As a result, we decided to narrow down the research by choosing the top 4 apps (by ratings) that are offering plant based diet services. These applications are:

With these 4 apps we decided to have a comparative analysis of their future inventory. This was made with the purpose to have an idea of the possible structure for an app and the kind of weakness that those competitors have that we could eventually use in the development of Vita’s platform. The main insights for their features were:

Again, this analysis helped us to have a better understanding of the market and the weak points from the direct competitors, but it didn't give us enough information about the possible users. Despite that at this point we still did not know about them, we understood that these two analyses (competitive and comparative) are required and needed to help us to have a better understanding of the market and the possible directions that the Company could take. They provided insightful information that we knew was going to be the base for the next step in the process. 
Having that better understanding of the environment we decided to start to elaborate on the questionnaire that we were going to use during the interviews. The questions were developed by categories with the purpose to have some direction about what kind of information we needed to gather that could help us to understand our potential users.  We divided the questionnaire in the following subcategories:

Further Exploration

Once we finished the questionnaire we were still thinking about more possibilities that could help us to understand the potential users. After some deliberation we decided to interview some professionals related to the topic like doctors, nurses, health trainers and dieticians. The main reason behind choosing them was their knowledge and experience. We wanted to hear from them about the expectations, common failures and pain points presented in all those who have been using their services to try to make changes in their lifestyle.

At this point we were unsure if the interviews were going to be enough to know who our users were going to be. That is why we decided to create a survey with a similar structure to the interview. It was sent to the public in general from 18 years old and above that can make their own decisions about their health and lifestyle. The purpose was to gather quantitative data that eventually could help us to validate some findings from the interviews and to fill up any gaps that we could have after classifying the findings from the interviews. We wanted extra support that could give us a better understanding of our potential users.

After 11 interviews with the general public, 5 interviews with professionals and 72 answers from the survey we were able to gather extensive and broad information that started to help us to have a better understanding of our potential audience.

The Findings

Some of the most relevant insights that we gathered during the general people’s interviews were related to:

The most relevant insights gathered during the interviews to “the professionals” were related to:

And the most insightful outcomes from the survey were:

The way that the different research methods complemented each other helped us to visualise and have a clearer idea of our user groups. It also helped us to identify the different pain points and frustrations they have and possible options about how to help them to improve their health and lifestyle.

We decided to call them the Yo-Yoers. They are people who need to have simple and achievable eating plans to start with as they have tried diets previously without any strong success. It has happened because they haven’t followed the professional advice properly, high costs with the different treatments offered and the lack of motivation due to their environment. They also have other pain points like the lack of information in regards to the options available and the idea that at their age the results are not going to be the same.

This group, despite being concerned with their weight, tend to be impulsive and inconsistent with their diets. They only follow short term plans.

At this point, the project was starting to have more clarity for us, the puzzle was halfway done and we just needed to move into the design process to see how we could help the Yo-Yoers. After a long deliberation as we didn't want to leave behind the core of their problems and important points like the following ones:

We also decided to analyse the reasons behind their mindset (Yo-Yo diets) and every single of their frustrations and pain points to try to understand them and visualise how we could help them. We took all these points into consideration and we started to write down possible problem statements. Then we were presenting them, filtering them, analysing them, combining them and at the end, we came up with our final problem statement:

“Yo-Yoers need to achieve consistent eating habits so that they can focus on other aspects of their life without becoming fatigued”

When you have a strong and direct problem statement, you can have a great base to come up with a direct and precise How Might We Statement that could make the design process richer and deeper. After some great statements where surprisingly some of them were very similar in between (I guess it happened due to the clarity of our problem statement) we decided unanimously for:

“How might we help Yo-Yoers to improve their eating goals?”

For more information about the Define Process please click here

The Design Process

At this stage we started to have a bunch of ideas. They were coming from the combination of the insights, the problem statement and all the experiences collected during the interviews that could be related to Yo-Yo's pain points.

And we decided to work with them and have a second round of ideation where we concentrated on the food replacement concept.

After some ideation we came up with the idea of a feature where the user would be able to search for any kind of product that is part of their diet and or makes part of a recipe that they are planning to prepare. Once they have found that healthier substitute(s) product(s), they will have the option to:

Learn about replacement product (Educational) | Find recipes where it could be used (Educational) | Save it as a favourite (Motivational) | Share it (Motivational)

In addition, we decided to incorporate positive reinforcement messages for every time that they have found a healthier substitution. This will have the purpose to create an emotional reward that could help them to increase their engagement with the app and their new healthy habits (Motivational).

The Testing Process “First Round”

For the sample we decided to go for people who have been previously trying diets without any significant success. We wanted to know from them about their experience and we gave them the following task:

"You're wanting to make fried rice for dinner but want a healthy alternative to white rice, how will you go about this?"

We also wanted to hear from them about their thoughts in regards to the specific feature and how impactful it could be in their lives.