UX Planet — Medium | Dmitriy Chuta

Do you own an iPhone but prefer to get rid of useless applications? Then, most likely, you’ve already tried to delete ‘Apple Health’, right? The reason for this may be that the benefits you may get from this app are unclear.

How does it actually work anyway? Basically, Apple Health makes a convenient ecosystem that collects, combines and provides information about an individual’s health condition and lifestyle, among other connected resources.

That means, by getting a user’s permission and approval, his/her personal information can be sent to Health from other applications and reversed back to these apps. That increases an overall “healthy” product segment value, and the application itself is rarely used.

Current version screenshots

All of the above made our Chapps think the idea over and brainstorm on how to improve the Health and make it useful and interesting for users.

Brainstorm evolution

At the very beginning, we were totally misguided while thinking of which features from other apps could be integrated into the Health for increasing the app usage by users.

After that, we figured out that there are too many functions for a single app, and defined this course as an incorrect one. Then, we had a thought, to develop the interface in accordance for each individual user’s needs. But even by moving to this approach the application still remains too multifunctional.

As a result of moving step by step, we all came to the conclusion that Apple Health is an independent and stable app, that should not take in other already existing products functionality.

Apple Health can be treated and considered as:

1. A collector and distributor of information about lifestyle and health condition.
2. A motivator for people to follow a well-balanced lifestyle.

3. AppStore product segment, which is customer health-&-habits oriented.

4. Medical information card.

Next we decided to consider Health as a general dashboard of data and results coming from other devices and apps. Additionally, we decided to demonstrate and point out the goals in order for a user to get a full view of their progress.

This approach seemed for us to be more promising, and therefore we started on the very first application iterations.

The interface we’ve been building was based on four original squares, where each separate square was aimed at a single well-balanced lifestyle component: activity, mindfulness, nutrition and sleeping.

Something was still missing…

Even after all of that, the concept seemed incomplete with some missing parts. We started to visually show and prove that there is a logic connection between all our actions.

Since our next task was focusing on four squares as the basis of healthy lifestyle, we had completely forgotten about one fundamental detail…

The fifth element

One thing truly missed in the Health app is an emotional impact (emotional commitment). Colourful charts do not celebrate with you your success and achievements, they merely point out the facts.

Why is a healthy focused application not interested in how you are today, what mood you are in? It is literally the reflection of your lifestyle, how can it be indifferent to it?!

In fact, not many users see the connection in this chain: mood → state of health → activity → nutrition → meditation → sleep. The current app version makes an attempt to show this connection through funny videos, which barely drop a hint on mood and well-being.

These videos are pretty informative, however, do not influence user’s behaviour, habits and patterns.

Reanimation

Since our concept includes suggestions aimed at spicing the Health up for users’ view, we tried to increase motivation and turn the process of user-app interaction into a more fun and interesting experience by involving game elements.

Health points. BeHealthy

Our main gaming design element is achieving the goals, such as walking 10K steps, 8 hours sleeping, and capture emotions. For reaching these goals the user receives points (health points), that could be exchanged for rewards.

A heart symbolises health, a hexagon means honeycombs as a symbol of construction element.

Metaphorical meaning of this symbol states that “Good health consists of little wins”.

Thus, obviously, that following and tracking all performance rates at the same time is potentially too hard for the user. So, most likely it will not work out. Therefore introducing a user into the ecosystem should be phased, and proceeded in a step by step way.

Step 1. Emotions and rewards

1. A user can select his/her mood with the help of an emoji, responding scrolling, or automatic mood identification.

2. Once the emotion is defined, the app “responds” and offers a funny interaction, equal to that particular emotion.

In fact, any mood can be described by an interesting interaction, aiming at supporting or lightening positive mood and attitude.

Feeling good — high-five and get one healthy unit. If anger is taking over — kick the ball and get rewarded. Planting clouds with hands you free your mind from sad thoughts, and so on.

Clicking on interactive icons, a device responds with corresponding vibrations for enhancing the synergy effect.

The more variants of emotions that are available, the better it works, since continually repeated actions can simply annoy and irritate users.

Step 2. Set simple goals

The next step is the user’s data analysis. This is collected in a background mode, no matter which applications and devices he/she has. It mostly concerns the activity facts. iPhone tracks the number of steps, distance, expended calories. Meanwhile, it does not require any active interaction between a user and his/her smartphone after the application is installed.

Set simple activity goal for a new user, for example 10K steps to walk for a day. Once the goal is achieved, a user receives health points, collecting these brings the rewards over time.

Excitement. Step by step

Upon collecting all health points, users can feel passionate about the process and get excited about winning more and more rewards. On that stage, meditation is highly recommended. Users are offered some useful meditation orientated applications, with the process, details, explanation and points awarded for achieving this task.

Slowly involve sleep tracking into user’s habits, recommend gadgets and applications for this purpose. In this way, we help users to develop and follow good habits, learn the useful applications and gadgets.

By hitting the activity goal icon we are transferred to the page that shows Health’s standard video about positive healthy lifestyle results. Look through all recommended applications within this niche, take a closer look at personal performance and change the daily goal.

The pickiest part is nutrition diary because it requests user’s regular interaction with a gadget. Filling in all meals and products eaten by the day is a pretty much impossible task for many people.

However, we still can keep motivating people by getting more rewards.

Even if some users would prefer cheating the system and enter false values in order to get more health points, they can still receive positive experiences by meeting well-balanced lifestyle, useful apps, and gadgets.

And perhaps, someone even would give it a try to balance the way and style of life, which is definitely a win!

Increasing the level. Gamification

Slowly users are getting used to standard goals (10k steps per day, 8 hours of sleep, a minute for meditation) and he/she simply can get bored from easy level workout. At this stage it would be reasonable to add completely new goals and increase the complexity of reaching the ongoing ones.

In activity section would be good to suggest for check-in the gym, or increase physical activity level for improving productivity and getting higher results.

For reaching 8-hours-sleep goal we would add a specific time going to bed and the time to wake up.

In mindfulness section the meditation time can be increased or there we can offer useful tips and different apps for this purpose.

Basically, new goals are getting harder because previous ones are regularly reached. Looks like a game, doesn’t it? Thus, a user improves his/her personal app level and therefore gets more useful habits in real life.

Real rewards

Each person is looking for motivation. To be motivated means to strictly follow a certain goal that is able to become a real engine of one’s personal progress. Nicely designed achievements and the gradual moving towards the final goal are great, but not enough.

The weakness of gamification is that game attributes can be frustrating for some users, that in turn, causes disengagement with the app.

But we solve this problem by making rewards as the real products and services and achieving the goal is like winning self-conquest.

Win-Win. Perhaps, this one is the revolutionary feature that can take a chain of relations User →Apple→ Business up to the absolutely new level!

Roughly speaking, you are offering real presents from worldwide and local brands as a reward for a healthy lifestyle.

In other words, brands encourage users to follow well-balanced lifestyle by letting them get and use their products.

Сausal-effect connections

All conscientious people have to understand the purpose of both their action and the following consequences those actions have. Otherwise, an unconscious action makes no sense and leads to low-quality realization or ignoring it at all.

In order to fully put a user in a new lifestyle, but not just let him/her play a game, they should be continually and clearly informing as for causal-effect connections between lifestyle, well-being, and mood.

Any change needs to be accompanied by an affirmative or by question form.

Example:

The result: In the last 7 days a heart rate average in a state of rest has been reduced from 88 beats per minute to 60 beats per minute and become back to normal.

Possible reasons:

1. Daily walking steps average has increased from 8k to 10k steps
2. Drink less coffee? — Yes/No

Taping the possible reason a user is offered to watch an explaining video or a post about the connection between activity and cardiovascular system condition.

Conclusions

Health is definitely Apple’s genius product, that practically became a universal middle guy between other external apps. Thanks to this, it has become easier to follow and track healthy lifestyle attributes and rates. The personal medical card is such an amazing feature that completely deserves more investigations, descriptions and truly speaking — even a separate article.

The initial task was to make Apple Health more useful for users but without changing an original philosophy of the product.

The way we personally see the Health is more person-oriented, and we want the app to motivate and involve people in a healthy lifestyle.

In our design we:

1. Emotionally interact with a user
2. Set easily achieved goals with no extra pushing on
3. Encourage with real rewards
4. Demonstrate сausal-effect connections between all life spheres

Shortly speaking, we’ve tried to turn a well-balanced lifestyle into a nice game that makes a user forever a winner and brings him/her rewards just for being healthy 🙂

Thank you all for your attention and for reading this post to the end

P.S.: Which functions did you like and what would you like to implement into the Apple Health?

All the material was produced and prepared by Lena Brusenskaya — Chapps company lead designer.

We will keep experimenting around with many other interesting apps only if you promise to follow us with any of suggested formats more convenient for you: Dribbble, Instagram, Facebook, Medium

Apple Health of a Healthy Human was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.