As an individual who has struggled with an eating disorder, this project holds great personal significance to me. Over the years, I have encountered numerous challenges in obtaining proper treatment, and I recognize that my experience is not unique. In fact, it's common to encounter similar obstacles, ranging from extensive waitlists to being redirected due to co-occurring mental health disorders or not meeting age or weight criteria for treatment.

While I acknowledge that fixing healthcare systems is a complex and daunting task, I am dedicated to supporting individuals like myself and others in accessing the care they need, one step at a time. Ultimately, the opportunity to facilitate positive change in the lives of others is what motivates and inspires me.

Help more people successfully recover for good?

Help to eliminate some of the current barriers to seeking help?

Create a tool for users that addresses all of their unique needs for recovery?

Enable users to measure their success or progress without the use of numbers that may be triggering?

User Personas

Adults with real-world responsibilities commonly face obstacles when seeking treatment for eating disorders.

The prevalence of multiple or fluctuating disorders can exacerbate feelings of invalidation or inadequacy.

While gamification appeals to some, others may prefer an optional or less focused approach.

Many individuals attempting recovery experience multiple setbacks in the absence of guidance.

Interviews

Understanding The Users

How Might We?

The Problem

Accesible Eating Disorder Recovery for Everyone

Eating disorders are complex & unique to everyone, so making something that worked for every user was important.

Being mindful about not including anything that could be triggering or harm rather than help.

Making sure it was inclusive & had a gender-neutral theme.

Gamification is extremely helpful to some, but too overwhelming to others. I needed to find a way to have a balance.

Challenges

Create a tool that can bridge the gap between users & professional treatment.

Create something that can be used alongside treatment.

The Solution

Numerous barriers prevent individuals from accessing professional help and treatment for eating disorders, leading many to attempt self-recovery.

While some may succeed, a significant portion relapse multiple times or never recover.

5 weeks

Timeline

UX Researcher

UX/UI Designer

My Roles

Define & Discover

I also wanted to emphasize the diversity of eating disorders and the critical need for the app to be as inclusive as possible, addressing the unique needs of individuals with varying types of eating disorders.

While some may argue that six user personas are excessive, I believe it was deemed necessary to fully illustrate the intricate complexities of the user issues at hand.

Sketches & User Flows

Completing a daily mission

Creating a new goal

Ideation

New user onboarding & program setup

Checking in & updating accountability journal

Style Guide

When Wireframes & Lo-Fi Prototypes Get Together

I started off with four of the most important user goals, all from the perspective of a user who wants the full gamification experience in order to showcase those features. As I build on this more in the future I will include those user goals from a non-gamification viewpoint here to also showcase how the app works without gamification.

However I also knew that I wasn't quite ready for 100% lo-fi protoypes just yet. So instead I created moderately detailed wireframes (or non-functional lo-fi designs, if you will) to give me a clearer idea of what I wanted this to look like.

Based off of the ideation session and the sketches I had done, I knew that ultra minimalist wireframes would not only make little sense at this point in the project, but also wouldn't help in progressing things forward.

For the Design Mash-Up, we combined elements of eating disorder recovery with types of gamification.

I utilized two different ideation methods, Worst Idea and Design Mash-Up.

While both offered many great ideas, Design Mash-Up yielded the best ideas and was the most helpful.

The focus of Design Mash-Up was the gamification aspect, as that was the area I was having the most difficulty with.

Basic buttons, dropdowns, checkboxes, radials and input fields.

Somewhat minimalistic navigation bar with only the most important content.

Tabs for the mission window.

Accordion-style button to create a new goal.

Custom made visual buttons for Journal, First Aid and Missions.

Various other custom built components.

Color Pallet: Gender-neutral, calming, easy on the eyes, accessible.

Typography: Accessible, heading font is visibly different from body font for clear visual hierarchy.

Iconography: Rounded, duotone, slightly bubbly feel to be more inviting, 16px/24px/32px/40px.

This is just an overall snapshot of the style guide, showing just the most important aspects.

The Initial Design Process

First Round Of Testing

Second Round Of Testing

Final Designs & What I Changed

I included a feedback question at the end and got some great suggestions and comments.

Before

Added a bright red counter to the Missions button to make it pop more and easier to notice.

Before

Changed the 'Done' button on the missions tab to ensure it's easier to stand out when a task is done.

Changed the number of goals you can set during initial setup from 3 to 1 drung the to simplify the onboarding process.

Before

Changed the meal logging process to better encourage intuitive eating habits rather than only focusing on the food.

Before

Hi-Fi Designs & Testing

22 total testers

7 of those dropped or gave up, but it was unclear why those users were lost because the heatmaps showed clicks everywhere, including places that didn’t need to be clicked.

Overall usability score of 49% according to the Maze report.

Onboarding test - 100% success rate.

Overall test of all flows - 22% success rate.

Had to run a separate test for just the onboarding process due to having a large number of users dropping off during that part of the test.

Because of this issue, I plan to only use remote testing tools as an addition to live testing in the future.

‘next’ or ‘finish’ buttons were NOT misclicks (eg. ticking off check boxes/radials, tapping input fields).

I later learned after running live tests with users that the fail rate was due to Maze’s current inability to recognize that clicks other than

New Addition

As part of revamping the check-in process, I changed the wording on the welcome back screen to match the tone.

Added a separate screen to view all current goals, both to make it easier to set new goals and to also let users view their current goals in more detail and edit them.

New Addition

Product Delivery

A companion or tool to aide in eating disorder recovery.

Something that can either be used as a stepping stone to professional treatment and assist with harm reduction, or used right alongside treatment to help ensure a successful and meaningful recovery.

What This Product Is NOT

A permanent replacement for professional help.

My only intent is to create a tool to help break down the barriers that many of us face when seeking treatment.

*Special thanks to the friends who let me bounce countless ideas off them during the process of making this regarding colors, typography, and app names!