Fortify Wellness:
New Mobile Therapy App
Opportunity
Fortify Wellness is the only 360° holistic wellness platform offering therapy, coaching, fitness, and meditation all on one subscription platform.
Response
We were hired by our client to evaluate the existing user flow and design for a new app scheduled to launch in February 2024. If there was time, we were also asked to look at the onboarding process and the home dashboard. The initial goal was to make the app user friendly and visually appealing.
My Contributions
Shared responsibility of research through final design iteration.
Timeline
2 Weeks
The Team
4 UX Design Students
Learning More About Fortify Wellness
This is very much a passion project for the founder of the company. Motivated by an incident in her past, she envisioned a single app that would offer everything from fitness to mental health support all on one platform. Users would have the option of viewing prerecorded videos for free, or they could pay for a membership to have access to live one on one sessions.
Sounds Great! Where Do We Begin?
We started by learning more about our users. The initial deck we received indicated two very different groups of people who might use this app. The first was college students who were struggling with mood, stress, and lack of sleep due to the different demands being put on them. The second group were corporate employees in the next phase of their life. Since Fortify’s initial marketing and online presence is geared towards a younger demographic, we chose to focus on the first group for this sprint
Getting to Know Our Users
We interviewed 11 individuals who were either currently in school or just recently graduated to learn more about their self-care habits. Through affinity mapping we learned the following:
Difficult to Prioritize Self-Care
We learned that for many students, it was really challenging to keep up with all of the demands that were being put on them. For some, finances were tight, so they also had jobs or other obligations on top of their school work. This made it really difficult to find the time to make their health a priority.
Looking for Guidance
Several of our users expressed frustration with the mental health support available to them through their schools. It was either really hard to get an appointment, or they didn’t click with the counselor who was provided.
Developing Routines
On a positive note, the majority of the people we interviewed did understand the importance of having a self care routine even if they didn’t always make themselves a priority.
Introducing, Overextended Olivia
Combining all of our user insights together, we came up with a persona to represent a typical Fortify Wellness app user.
Olivia is a 21-year old theater major who currently works at the campus bookstore. With the lineup of upcoming shows she’s crazy busy memorizing her lines, but also worrying about a paper she has due for English. She’d love to have time to hang out with her friends, but between school and work she’s not sure how she’s going to make that happen. There’s no way she can sustain her current pace, so she knows something is going to have to give.
She’s learned from experience that she feels better and more capable of handling all of the things she needs to get done if she can get a workout in, but there’s just not enough time in the day to make it over to the gym as often as she would like. She’s set really high goals for herself, but all that pressure is starting to get to her, and she’s not sure where to turn.
She hasn’t heard the best things about the services available at her school, so as an alternative, she’s been looking at various apps she can use to help create mental and physical health routines she can do from home.
We’ve Got You
Thinking of Olivia and synthesizing all of our findings into what students would be looking for in an app that would support their physical and mental well being, we developed the following problem statement.
Students need an easy and consistent way to manage their mental and physical health, access resources, and connect with a professional, because the stresses of being a college student can become overwhelming to the point of having a breakdown.
To develop those features, we ask ourselves a series of how might we questions.
How might we provide accessible resources that will promote user consistency?
How might we encourage physical wellness while also allowing users to prioritize their metal health?
And finally…
How might we ensure that users see value in our product?
“I know I should, but how much can I?”
“I’ve tried counseling at school, but I didn’t connect with my counselor and I don’t think it helped.”
“I perform my best and am happiest when I’m carving time out for self care.”
How might we empower users to feel in control of their mental health journey and give them confidence while choosing a therapist?
Let’s See What We’re Working With
We were initially given a series of individual screens that had been commissioned by Fortify Wellness. We linked them together into a basic user flow and did a preliminary round of usability testing.
Wait, What?
In the process of testing, we learned people were confused by the pricing structure and didn’t realize there were options for free access. They were also turned off by the screening questions used for matching with a counselor when they thought they were looking at a fitness app.
We realized our priority would be to find the balance between providing/receiving information, but doing it in a way that wouldn’t scare off our users.
Making Some Changes
We added to the screens to include more information on the pricing. We also expanded the questionnaire and added the option of choosing your therapist to give the user more control over the experience
We continued to refine our screens and run through user testing
Our Two-Week Sprint Comes to an End
In the end, we set up a framework for the app that would allow for future expansion.
Reflections and Next Steps
This project was a good lesson in not overpromising deliverables before fully understanding what we had to work with. We should have taken an extra day to do an evaluation of the current screens before creating the scope of work. It turned out we weren’t able to refine as many of the flows as we would have liked.
In the end, it was decided that the pricing screens were the most important to the overall success of the app, so our time and energy was focused on those. This decision was confirmed through testing and the number of iterations we needed to go through before arriving at our final solution.
This app is very much in its infancy. Our recommendation is for the developers to focus on the fitness and meditation videos next to give their early adopters an idea of what the final product will look like and how it differs from the competition.