UX Case Study: More - A Fasting App

There are a wide assortment of health apps that focus on a diverse range of wellness topics. My challenge was to conduct user research to understand people’s relationship with mental, physical, and emotion well-being to develop an app that will drive them to positive action. My app will need to re-imagine how people can adopt and maintain a routine that improves their well-being.

To choose a topic for my wellness app, I conducted user interviews and user surveys to better understand user’s passions and frustrations surrounding wellness and nutrition. I found in my user interviews and surveys that a majority of interviewees had participated in a fast before.

I thought the topic of fasting was an interesting area to explore, so I conducted more user interviews and surveys to further explore this topic. I conducted a SME interview with someone who is in the process of becoming a certified nutritionist. From this interview, I found that staying hydrated is a vital part of keeping up strength during a fast. She described how a person should be drinking about half their body weight in oz in water (this includes water from food, coffee, tea, etc.).

I created an affinity diagram to organize my research findings from my user interviews and surveys. From the affinity diagram, I noticed that people had really individualized fasting goals. However, there were mainly two different motivations for starting a fast: health motivations and personal/religious motivations. People described end result goals as a feeling: having more energy, finding clarity, and gaining peace. Some people were even hesitant about doing a fast in the first place due to self doubt, not having clear reasons, or not believing they had the strength to continue their fast.

Based on the two different types of motivations, I created two user personas: one health motivated and one personally/religiously motivated. However, there were more individuals in my user research who were motivated by religious or personal reasons, so I chose to focus my wellness app on someone who is more faith motivated. Even still, some of the people who were fasting for religious reasons, may have also wanted breakthrough for their health. For instance, someone who is fasting to grow closer to God may also want to heal their digestive issues.

I also conducted a business and competitive analysis looking at 9 different companies centered around fasting. I found that in these apps, most the layout was information heavy and kind of intimating for users. These apps were all centered around only health goals, and almost all of them required a paid premium membership to access important fasting data. I also made a list of features that they included in their app and I was able to use this information to conduct a feature prioritization.

I made sure that any feature I included in my wellness app circled back to my HMW statement: How might we help fasters feel empowered to achieve their personalized fasting goals? I really wanted the features on the app to help people feel empowered. My end goal was to create a fasting app centered around mindfulness. My feature prioritization also allowed me to determine what features were high in value as well as the type of effort. This helped me decide which features to include and the order in which I created them.

For my mood board, I was really drawn to interfaces with organic shapes and round corners. Keeping in mind the Boba and Kiki effect, I wanted these elements to create a more warm and inviting feeling to my app. My branding greatly pulled inspiration from encouraging fruit stickers. I wanted to keep my branding encouraging and playful, and I felt that these encouraging stickers added to the uplifting tone of my app. I played around a lot with color in my high-fidelity prototype, so I made sure to include sans serif fonts for my main pieces of information.

I created a low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high-fidelity prototype for my wellness app.

Meet More: A Fasting App centered around mindfulness to help users feel empowered to achieve their personalized fasting goals.

Less food. More Music. More Journaling. More Goal Setting. More Prayer. More doing. More Laughs.