Nexus Community
Nexus Community is an app’s function that encourages people to pursue healthy lifestyles via peer support community. Rather than purely information exchange, Nexus Community provides more emotional support between peers’ communication. Through Bonding Challenges, Group Discussion, Anonymous Posting, users will have a stronger passion for achieving goals and communicating with others.
About the project
Challenge
This project, is in collaboration with Nexus Digital Technology. Based on a problem-centric design, the project’s goal is to get rid of restrictions from traditional forms of social communication and offer users another possibility to communicate and share health-related topics from a peer support perspective.
The project's research question is: How might Nexus Digital provide peer support for people with similar health goals?
Design Process
Before
After
Secondary Research
From competitive analysis and previous studies of peer support, health advice, and socializing forms, I summarized users’ motivation in using health apps from 6 aspects.
Primary Research
Survey
The initial app seldom has analytics data, I firstly conducted surveys to get a basic understanding of potential users’ health condition satisfaction, health hindrance, and from whom they’d like to seek advice.
Semi-structured Interview
I then had semi-structured interviews with 8 participants. The purpose was to get more qualitative feedback through chat-based conversations, from participants' current habits, external elements that influence their motivation, and current solutions that participants use to pursue better lifestyles.
Empathy Map
4 empathy maps were built as keywords extraction. From 4 quadrants (says, thinks, does, and feels) of the empathy map. user groups can be categorized from their communication preferences and health habits pursuit.
Hybrid Card Sorting
For creating a logical information architecture, I have also done hybrid card sorting on the classification of health content. The card sorting allowed 8 participants to put 20 random cards into predefined categories, or participants can also customize cards.
According to the investigation, each of the 16 cards was considered not only related to one health and well-being topic, and some participants had no idea of the cards’ meaning.
Through observation, we can find out that the information architecture can not be refined by putting one health topic into a specific category.
Concept Testing
To make sure user-centric design, before designing detailed prototypes, I tested more than 10 visual wireframes as user requirements translation. During the process, users were involved in simulating the use of real applications, they were allowed to pick their favorite ideas and give explanations.
Insights
7 pain points can be discovered from research. In order to make ideas into reality, those insights need to be incorporated with business elements to consider their feasibility.
Future-state Journey Maps
From the above insights found, two future-state journey maps can be built to maximize solutions that might work for four user groups. Each journey map can demonstrate the best case of service points and guide later high-fidelity prototypes design.
New Structure
New interface design was simplified and modified, and 5 main functions are designed for users with 4 mindsets.
Welcome Page
When joining the Nexus Community, users can select health and wellbeing topics according to their preferences, enabling Nexus to recommend related topics based on 8 health and wellbeing themes.
Bonding Challenge
Bonding Challenge allows users to achieve goals with individuals who have similar goals. In this way, they can bond with their friends to give mutual supervision via confirming attendance.
Create Posts
Users can create posts to share experiences, questions, and moods with other Nexus members. Especially when they want to post more private topics, they can set anonymous to hide their identity.
Create Groups
Creating groups can be a good choice when users want to start a new topic; they can recruit group members by sharing private group link or set it as public.
