Improving lives through better eating.
Lifesum aims to help people make conscious decisions toward a healthy and balanced lifestyle. The world of health is changing and well-being is viewed in a broader sense than through weight management alone. The analysis of extensive behavioral user data helps us design a personalized health plan accommodating body type, nutritional levels, exercise habits, dietary preferences, and overall goals. Of course, I can’t share insights or methods on a detailed level, but I’m happy to discuss ideas or help to assist scientific study ideas that might come up. You’ll find further initiatives in the private area. Simply approach me for the password.
Applying a mixed method approach - “Mobile On-boarding” (2019/2020)
Resolving too much complexity: Due to its success and the attention that came along with that, the Lifesum app was initially built very fast. The huge amount of features being provided was on one hand very good, but at the same time, it undermined consistency and ease of use which was reflected in our food tracking-, signup- and retention-rates (%). One crucial UX element that was lacking is proper user on-boarding. It was a low-hanging fruit for us to catch, so we decided to put our focus on it.
A mix of methods: We investigated how people approach the Lifesum app initially by applying a mixed-method research approach. In this context, we applied on-site interviews, remote-usability tests, heuristic analysis, diary studies, competitor analysis, and a focus group to collect information. Furthermore, we aligned our research with feedback from customer support, analytics, and best practice examples.
But: Heads up! When starting the project we uncovered a major roadblock: Every stakeholder had a different mental model of what "on-boarding" actually means. Some people were talking about the signup, others about a certain timeframe, others about value. Therefore we collected insights here first, to bring everyone on the same page and move towards one direction.
Make it visual: Later, all research results were visualized in the form of an affinity map, which served as a foundation for our insights poster. This poster summarises and visualizes all the information we’ve collected. We printed it out and placed it in all available meeting rooms, so employees get reminded of our core audience, their needs, and so they can ideate on the go. Since that, many changes were made to the Lifesum app, and many cool things are still on the way…
Ethnography - “Undercover in the US” (2019)
Ethnographic field research involves the study of groups and people as they go about their everyday lives. You get yourself in the shoes of those you’re observing, you get into their heads, as well as try to understand their perspectives and expectations. As we want to grow in the US, it was important for us to explore this market in detail with a 1-month field research project directly in California. Within four weeks we went through several guerilla- and expert interviews as well as service safari activities. The focus was on observing how people behave and interact with their phones (as well as Lifesum) in nutrition/eating-related situations. Needless to. say, that we collected a massive amount of new learnings, but the biggest challenge was to showcase lifestyle differences to our teams back home in Scandinavia. Being visual was key here. After all, results can be summarised in only one sentence: “We need to challenge or even change our mental models”. When offering a service like Lifesum, believing that people actually want to change their habits just based on an indicator like millions of app downloads (interest) becomes all too easy. But this mental model required honest reflection.
“Overweight is cool!” - REALLY?
With the body-positive movement, we see unfortunately a problematic attitude change. Indeed, it is a great movement away from eating disorders (underweight-edge), but it also allows overweight and obese people to justify their unhealthy condition. So we are walking a fine line. Interviews revealed, that there is not only poor awareness of health risks but moreover that overweight is perceived as “sexy” and “cool”. The pressure among young girls is high and there is - like with diets - no orientation in what is right and what is wrong. Awareness, honesty and helping people to anticipate consequences in the early stages of the experience, but also being supported continuously are promising levers companies can take to help and improve life quality. We wanted to anchor these insights within our visual language, our writing style, and our imagery. As we didn’t have proper guidelines for this, we started to create them based on real user needs. That’s how a new brand strategy and platform were born.
“What was I supposed to buy?”
Have you ever actively observed people buying food? Chances are you didn’t because you have to concentrate so much on your stuff, that you don’t notice what is going on around you. When you observe people, you will realize that they try to remember and find the items they need or they get socially distracted (e.g conversation, observing what others buy) and therefore forget about their initial intention (“What was I supposed to buy?”). Additionally they are facing massive choice, time-pressure and the physical coordination of handling the shopping basket (which is often overloaded). Overall, it’s a very stressful experience. Now, let’s add a smartphone to this situation. If you actively observe the in-store situation you will see that people are barely able to focus on their phone. One arm handles the shopping basket the other selects items and puts it in. There is no third arm helping to pull-through a messy mobile UX. The odds for damaging your phone as you let it drop are higher than the chances that your shopping-list-feature provides value. This explains why users ask for this feature (help to focus), but you won’t see high usage rates (impractical). It doesn’t really solve their problem in-context. Instead people are still using old-school paper-pen versions or pre-installed note-apps on their phones. I’ve asked a couple of people, why that is and the answer was surprisingly consistent: Because it’s easy accessible and provides minimum structure in a messy situation. this translates into one-click access, well designed structure, optimal size of design elements, proximity to thumbs and gaze patterns as well as congruency as leading UX principles when designing for such a feature.
“Surfin’ USA!?”
Another interesting thing I’ve learned during this research trip was, how trends are made, especially when it comes to fitness/nutrition industry. Americans report, that it is well known that trends are made in Los Angeles and spread from overthere to the whole country. When diving deeper into that topic it became clear that these trends find their origin in Hawaii. One root of that is the active surf scene in California. Surfers travel to Hawaii and bring back new environment-friendly approaches to living and eating. I stumbled across this information by applying something called “method acting”. It’s an acting principle to create empathy. You live the live of someone else for a while to experience their life challenges and though processes. Without going into detail here, it helped us prioritize our activities around Meal Plans and how we communicate them. Instead of going with trends only (Fasting / Keto), we decided to go with the underlying user need of sugar reduction. One example for this is our “Sugar Detox” plan, which we successfully launched at New Year 2019/2020.
Users first - “New company values and brand strategy”
Reporting can be boring, so I though it’s cooler to draw the story of our branding process. It also measures up to the experience way better, as it was colorful, chaotic, challenging and last but not least: more than worth it!
PS: Of course there are official documents for this, too ;-)
