Client Consultancy Project
End-to-end design for a transformative health and wellness platform.
Timeline
May → September 2023
Team
Worked in a team with 2 other UX designers and under the guidance of the founder and project manager.
Tools
Figma
Teams
Notion
Mural
Google Forms
Role
User Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Usability Tester
at a glance
This project was undertaken towards the completion of my MA in User Experience Design at Regent’s University London. Within four months, my teammates and I delivered research-driven UX recommendations, prototypes tested against users, and a future roadmap for a transformative health and wellness platform based in Hong Kong. We used a mixed methods research approach to interview 16 representative users and 8 usability testing participants.
Our goal was to understand how digital interfaces can be best designed to support users in engaging with wellness content and services and provoke change.
Due to the non-disclosure agreement with the client, I am unable to show the bulk of my work, but here is a brief overview of the work I completed. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more!
*Select screens have been approved to be shown by the client but are displayed in greyscale to protect the company’s IP
user research
Prior to building the product, we conducted 16 user interviews over the course of 2 weeks to empathise with users and understand their unique needs and pain points.
We were then able to segment the users based on the way in which they would be interacting with the product. We deepened our understanding by creating user persona cards, empathy maps and user journey maps.
To highlight the primary features of the design, we created user needs statements, problem statements, and hypothesis statements for each persona.
prototyping
Based on our understanding of the users we created wireframes which were presented to the client for feedback. High-fidelity prototypes were then created on Figma based on the client’s feedback.
user testing
As a team, we conducted remote, moderated usability testing sessions with 8 participants in 5 days.
We utilised affinity mapping to identify key themes to focus on for the next iteration of the product. We were able to identify 8 main themes, with 4 of them of being critical issues.
hand-off with developers
As a final step to conclude the project, we created PRDs to hand off to the team of developers who will begin building the product.
Key Takeaways
Using my intuition as a designer
There exists a gap between what someone says they want to do, and what they actually end up doing. It is then also our job as designers to use our knowledge and experience to interpret what users are saying in interviews - and to continuously test to see how they react to certain features.
Look at the product as if it was your first time seeing it
During the usability tests, user flows that seemed obvious to us were found to be confusing to many of the users. It’s easy as a designer to build upon a design to make it more complicated, when that isn’t always the answer.
Sometimes it’s best to take a step back, look at the product as if it was your first time seeing it, and stripping content and features that may not even serve the users.
Balancing business and user needs
When we presented our initial ideas for the product, our client redirected us to better fulfil the business needs, as we were hyper-focused on user needs.
Although it is our job as designers to advocate for our users, at the end of the day there is a delicate balance to be struck with business needs.