ActiveHealth Refresh
Making a simpler, more engaging experience to learn about health
To protect client confidentiality, I’ve changed some details of this project.
What is ActiveHealth?
ActiveHealth offers a custom website and mobile app to help people become more engaged with their health. ActiveHealth was looking to not only offer more types of ways for people to engage with their health, but they also wanted to find ways to make the experience more polished and more useful to their members. It was my job to help the team figure out ways to make the most of the website and the mobile app.
Understanding the platform itself
One of the first activities I performed was to understand the ins and outs of the platform. I spent each day for a year using the platform to understand what value members actually get.
The member-facing website of ActiveHealth
I learned the following from this personal take on the platform:
- There are multiple modalities of learning about your health (education, coaching, self-learning)
- It was not an easy way forward after logging in to see what was available or what I needed to do
- There was not a coherent voice of what the product was offering to me
- There were many areas of the experience that were difficult to use and not friendly to those who use assistive technologies
Looking through prior user research, some of these points were also echoed, but were worded as “I can figure it out, eventually”.
I then worked with the organization to better understand what each product in the platform was doing and what the intended experience was meant to be. To help the organization, I delved deep into each of the main sections of the website to understand what was there and what opportunities to improve the experience could be made by also improving the experience for all members.
Putting a new experience together
From all of this research, it was time to help reframe the experience to make it easier for members to understand and get started working on their health. Now, when members log in, they can see what was available: a health assessment, rewards, coaching, health actions, information from their corporate HR team, and addition health-related goodies.
After getting buy-in from the team, I worked on created some initial concepts of what the experience could be:
Sketches of the evolution of the new homepage, showing all of the opportunities to learn and engage with one’s health
Once the actual design work started, each iteration of the design not included feedback from project stakeholders, but also included feedback from prospective and actual users of the site. After about 6 iterations and feedback from 2,000 people, the new version of the site launched with over 1 million users, reporting how much better the site’s visuals and content were than what they had seen.
But work wasn’t done yet.
A better app experience, too
Opportunities for further engagement
On the mobile app side, the experience had similar opportunities for improvement:
The mobile app experience – a series of icons was intended to guide members through a variety of activities to improve their health
- People didn’t understand what stars on the interface meant and how it related to their health
- People didn’t understand what their “progress” was towards meeting their health goals
- The overall experience suffered from purely relying upon seeing in order to enjoy and take value from the experience
With these observations in mind, I followed a similar process as with the website: I used the overall experience, noting major takeaways about the experience, but also noting where a combination of fun and accessibility together can be brought together.
After creating multiple different concepts and iterations, I helped the team re-frame the experience in a more goal-oriented type of way: tying together a visual of a health goal and a list of activities members can do.
Sketches to explore how the experience can tie together progress and clarity of what needs to be done next
What did people think of the new design?
The new experience leads members through each day’s activities with a balance of text and imagery to provide clarity on what is coming up
Making these visual and experiential changes made it easier for members to understand the following about the program better:
- Progress is tied to a daily and weekly engagement with education and activities related to a specific health goal
- Icons and illustrations are supplemented with appropriate text and colors to make it easier for people to understand the experience
- By better showing daily and weekly progress, there were new opportunities to celebrate success
When the new design was put in front of current users and prospective users, the new design, even though it had more “clicks”, had a way to draw people to using the app more (and even enjoying the new experience).
As some of our participants mentioned:
- “The graphics are cute!”
- “So that’s what the stars meant!”