Sustain
Helping young people build healthy habits, Sustain is an app and responsive website I designed in Figma.
Role: Full Stack UX Designer
The Problem
Young people want to improve their habits, but some become discouraged early and some lose momentum later on.
Responsive
There is a fully designed experience for mobile websites, desktops, and apps. Each presents a largely similar experience, with slight adjustments for the use cases of each platform.
Daily Check-In
Users check in everyday with a series of quick, ranked-scale questions, custom counting stats entry, and an optional listing of accomplishments.
Progress Tracking
As users track their custom counting stats and mood on daily reflections, they can see how these change over time, and can compare them to each other and their goals.
The Process
Interviews
I interviewed a set of people under 30 years old to better understand their habits and their experiences trying to change them. It was useful learning that some had success with mindfulness, but many were not able to reach the change they wanted.
User Personas
The two user personas represent two parts of the process: start and middle. The discouraged perfectionist sets expectations too high, gets quickly disappointed, and then stops their habit change. The sprinter is able to make change, but they have a hard time keeping up momentum.
Problem Statements
When creating problem statements, I focused on the most precise definition of their pain point. The more specific it is, the more nuanced our solution will be.
Competitive Audit
There are a variety of habit change apps and websites, so I audited 4 of them. I learned about the ubiquity of the onboarding process to personalize the user experience, that progress tracking was really important to users, and that many apps leveraged mindfulness.
User Journey
The on-boarding process is the chance to prove to the user that this product is useful. It has to represent the methodology of the app — mindfulness — while priming the user for the habit change journey they are about to embark on.
Paper Wireframes
Paper wireframes help to quickly iterate on the toughest problems. For this project, that meant keeping the on-boarding pages easy and simple, making the in-app experience fast and meaningful, and providing ample opportunity to track progress.
Digital Wireframes
I then developed the low fidelity version of the app, including the digital wireframes and basic prototyping. I wanted to keep the designs from the plan while adjusting formatting slightly to best fit the actual size of the phone.
Moderated Usability Study
Next, I recruited a new crop of potential users who are under 30 years old to try the app out. I learned that the reflection process was unclear, and that users liked the progress tracking and wanted more features for it.
Iterate
I fixed some essential navigation errors, developed the progress tracking features, revised the journal page, and clarified the daily check-in counting stats process.
Design System
The color palette and type hierarchy are inviting, encouraging, and clear.
Responsive: Mobile Website
I had to resize the app for mobile websites, as they have space committed to browser navigation. I kept the app relatively similar as the use cases were likely similar, except I also added a download app button because that’s ultimately the best experiences.
Responsive: Desktop Website
For the desktop website, I wanted to highlight the progress tracking, as the additional digital real estate allows for larger graphs.
Final Product
Impact
Users can use mindfulness to improve their habits and lives. Early perfectionists will set more realistic goals, and people who used to loose momentum will remind themselves of why they started off well.
Takeaways and Next Steps
Develop for Authentic Testing
Letting users actually track data on a day-to-day basis would reveal a lot about what is working and what needs to change on the app.
Relying on Users for Hard Problems
Changing habits is really hard — if I could solve that I’d be a billionaire. So I leaned on my user research to find where people found success and where they hit pain points. From there, I made the app to promote the good and evade the bad.