Vita Helps You Build A Happier Life

Key Challenges

Vita, a not-for-profit organisation, has a mission to empower people achieving healthier, fuller lives through sustainable lifestyle change. Vita focuses on disease prevention by combining behavioural science and human-centred design to educate people to make better decisions and live better lives.

Some problems communicated to us were:

• We are now living in the age of degenerative and man-made diseases due to the top three killers as chronic diseases are: heart disease, cancer and chronic lung disease.
• Chronic diseases are preventable (70–90%) by making better life choices.
• Nine out of ten Australian will die prematurely from a disease that’s mostly related to lifestyle and habit or circumstance.

How We Started

I approached this project with the Design Thinking framework.

My contribution

I contributed to write research planning, interview users, synthesised research, create a persona, user-flows, design prototypes in varying fidelity levels + testing + iterate, create the information architecture.

Talking to People in Our Network + a Nutritionist

We want to learn about people’s behaviours around food and their lifestyle; what motivates them to eat healthily and the challenges they have. How does the whole-food industry relate to the current lifestyle?

We spoke to 18 people in our networks, who could possibly be our target customers.​

We also spoke to a nutritionist to understand the types of clients & the common questions they would ask.

Some insights from our user interviews

“Last time I ate fruit was a week ago.”

“HelloFresh means less UberEats.”

“Cooking is tedious after a long day at work.”

Further Analysis

We wanted to understand food trends and consumers’ eating habits in Australia.

• 10% more Australians are opting to get their protein requirements from dairy and plants rather than meat compared to a year ago.
• Eating on the go is increasingly popular among Australian consumers.
• 6/ 10 Australians consider food delivery apps a “normal thing to do these days”.
• Almost 1 out of 5 Australians say they tend to eat healthier when they order via food delivery apps compared to when they cook.
• When it comes to food and cooking, convenience is king: with 2 out of 3 Aussies opting for food that is quick and easy to buy.
• 1 out of 4 saying that they never take a lunch break away from their desk during the week.
• Therefore dinner has become the biggest and most looked forward to for a majority of Australians.
• 1 out of 4 Aussies eats dinner in front of the TV every day.

We analysed competitors to find Vita’s market positioning, most importantly looked at their platforms that influence sustainable healthy eating decisions. The majority of them at the time was about calorie counting and convenience, but rarely educational. So, we positioned Vita on the educational and convenient axis.

Key Research Learnings

We were swamped in research notes & insights. After many conversations & thought, we extracted these key insights from the interviews:

• Users have poor knowledge about food and nutrition.
• Users need healthy eating support in their busy lifestyle.
• Users need an easy solution to eating healthily.

The emerging patterns from the data said that people want to learn about what healthy food looks like and need guidance to do so. This meant an opportunity for Vita apps to provide educational content around what healthy food looks like and the recipes to make eating healthy easy and enjoyable.

Meet Sam

The insights from synthesis enabled us to identify the key mindset — Sam.

We looked deeper into understanding Sam better by learning about how he feels, sees, hears and says. Knowing this will enable us to empathise and help to solve his needs.

Empathy Map

Hypothesis

“We believe that by educating Sam about food and nutrition Vita can help him to make a start improving their health.
And we’ll know Vita is making an impact when Sam starts recording his meals and weights regularly.”

HMW

How Might We help and encourage Sam to go for healthier options by providing food and nutrition knowledge?

How Might We help Sam plan his meals with a variety of inspiring food choices?

How Might We make healthy eating desirable and easy?

Design and Test

We run a series of design studios with our team.

Sketches from the Design Studio session

There were a few ideas we wanted to test with target customers, especially busy professionals.

From these test efforts, we learned:​

• Users don’t want to plan for the entire weekly meals in one go.
• Users enjoy the food fact information and plan a meal using the recommended recipes they just learned.
• Users suggest to include preferred times to be notified about food fact and have the option to received no notification.
• Users want to be asked about specific diets information such as Atkins, Keto, bulletproof during the onboarding process.

The paper prototypes allowed us to test, validate, and iterate quickly to achieve the outcome we want for the MVP.

On-boarding user testing

We evaluated all feedback from users and iterated accordingly:

• Add the function to plan daily and plan for one meal.
• Include healthy recipes for each food fact, to allow user plan meal based on ingredients.
• Add the time preference to send food fact notification in the onboarding process and allow the user to change it in their profile.

The Happy Path

After understanding Sam’s process and his feeling when using the Vita app, we mapped out the user flow for learning about the food facts and meal planning with the Vita app. Through this process, we designed the user interface, navigations and elements for the prototype.

Food Fact and Notification Flow

Sam received a notification on the mobile at a certain time of the day, to educate himself about different food and their benefits. Vita provided recipes related to the food fact. Sam can also add the recipe to the favourites and shopping list. The function of the shopping list is to help Sam shop ingredients efficiently.

Food Fact User-flow

Meal Planning

Vita wants to help Sam eat healthier by planning his meals from the recipes recommended to him. There are a couple of meal plans available: weekly and daily plan; with various meals choices such as snacks, appetisers, main dishes, and desserts.

Meal Plan User-flow

Content Strategy

We conducted three card-sorting sessions with different users because the patterns were very similar and we were going to test the IA again with the paper prototype. From the card sorts, we came up with three main content categories for MVP:

• food facts,
• recipes, and
• meal plan

Mid-Fidelity Wireframe

For this 2-week design sprint, I built a mid-fi wireframe in Figma. For the hi-fi wireframe, we’ll need to look into Vita’s branding strategy, which will be part of the next sprint.

The prototype included in the mid-fi wireframe are learning about food fact and meal planning from the recommended recipes.

Next Steps

• Conduct more testing for the mid-fi wireframe.
• Vita branding strategy
• Design hi-fi wireframe
• Identify secondary and tertiary personas
• Look at teaming up with Hello Fresh or Marley Spoon to simplify groceries shopping and cooking processes.

My Learning

• We need to have in-depth empathy with our persona so that we can create the right messaging for the users.
• It requires open and honest communication among the team in order to identify the right problem and solutions during synthesising the research data.
• The indicator of knowing that we solve the right problem is when there are many solutions and opportunities to offer to the users.

Kudos:

To my team: Vasiliki Adamidou, Alex Power