Olive

Overview

"Olive" is a health-focused, responsive web app developed to support users in achieving balanced wellness goals through personalized recommendations and user-friendly insights. Created during a comprehensive UX Design course with Career Foundry, Olive reflects key design principles centered around accessibility, user engagement, and behavioral nudges that foster positive health habits.

The Challenge

To design a health-conscious responsive web app that empowers people to stay on top of their health needs and conditions.

The Goal

A web app that simplifies the process of habit transformation, providing users with the features they need to enhance their overall lifestyle.

The Process

The Olive app design process followed a user-centered approach using the Design Thinking Process. It began with problem identification and solution brainstorming. Market research was conducted to understand business needs and competitors. User research identified the target audience and their pain points, analyzed through affinity maps and user stories. Personas were created, and user flows were designed to structure content. Ideas were visualized using wireframes, tested in usability tests, and iterated for improvements.

Problems X Solutions

I began my project by clearly defining the problem to be addressed based of the project brief and then brainstormed potential solutions. Starting with a thorough problem identification lays a strong foundation for the design process, ensuring that every effort is focused, user-centered, and innovative. This approach enables efficient design decisions and proactively mitigate potential risks, ultimately creating a solution that truly resonates with users and fulfills project objectives.

Identified Problems

• Many people are suffering from burnout because of the “always-on” lifestyle that living in a digital age can cause.

• Due to the stresses of work and life in general, many people struggle to stay on top of their health needs and conditions.

• People are seeking tools to help them stay on top of their health and wellness, as well as for greater balance between the challenges of health, wellness, work, and life in general.

• The existing tools to help people get healthier and happier are not designed in an inclusive way for users’ varying needs.

Proposed Solutions

• A Web App that allows people to manage their health information keeping it safe and confidential for users and providers.

• A feature that empowers users to change their habits to a healthier lifestyle by customizing a program with new habits guided by professionals.

• A feature that allows users to save their medical history, as well as share possible symptoms with a doctor, or even set up appointments.

• A feature that users can search for healthy and delicious recipes to diversify their diets and stay on top of their health and nutrition habits.

User Research

Moving on with the empathizing phase of my project, I performed User Interviews and Surveys with potential users of the Olive app. This helped me identify the recipients of my design and get invaluable insights into their needs, behaviors, and preferences when using the App, guiding my design decisions moving forward with the project.

User Interviews

The Goals

• Find out what people think and feel about using a health-conscious app to keep track of their physical and/or mental health.

• Find out what would be useful and easier for users to reach their health goals while using a well-being and health-conscious app.

• Evaluate features the app already has while gathering ideas from users for improving those features and adding new ones.

The Outcome

• Through the user interviews, I could identify the key points of participants’ goals and needs regarding health and well-being, and how each one values some features and contents the most.

• I was able to identify some similarities in participants’ needs and goals as well as have a scope of how my ideas would work, and if existing features would be helpful for users’ contexts and scenarios.

• The feedback and data collected were precious in moving on with the project as they helped me shape my persona profile and the design path I would be taking.

User Survey

The Participants

The survey had a total of 18 participants.

The Goals

• Find out if people use or have used health-conscious platforms/applications.

• Find out if users are satisfied with the current health-conscious tools they use or have used.

• Find out which features are the most valuable in a health-conscious app for the users.

Insights

• Most people who took the survey believe a well-being app could help them take care of their mental and physical health.

• Most people who took the survey had clear features in mind they would like to see in a well-being app that would help them keep track of their health.

• Most of the people who participated on the survey think their current health-conscious platform could be better and/or have more features.

Affinity Map

During the Define phase of the Design Thinking process, I synthesized user research data gathered in the Empathize phase to gain a deeper understanding of users’ needs, emotions, and motivations. The goal here is to frame the problem in a human-centered way, aligning closely with users' real experiences. To organize the data collected from interviews, I created an affinity map, which allowed me to categorize insights, identify patterns, and address user pain points more effectively. This structured approach provided clarity and focus, ensuring that my design solutions would meaningfully respond to users' needs.

Affinity Map Insights

App Features

• People are looking for an app that has workout tutorials and relaxation practices as well as recipe options that match their diet type and routine.

• People are looking for an app whose feature options are customized according to their needs and goals.

Challenges

A common challenge for all participants is the fact they find it very hard to keep themselves motivated and stay on top of their health and well-being while having a busy and sometimes stressful routine to deal with.

Navigation & Functionality

Participants seem all to believe that an intuitive, organized, and easy-to-navigate app is essential to catch their attention and gain their long-term fidelity.

Goals & Motivations

The participants’ primary goal is to find practical and efficient ways to maintain physical fitness and support their mental well-being amid busy schedules and demanding routines.

Needs

• Participants seem to believe that setting time for themselves daily helps them take care of their well-being and health.

• Participants feel that maintaining discipline and committing to healthy habits are essential for staying on top of their health and well-being.

User Personas

At this stage of the project, I centered my design decisions around the users, creating user personas based on insights gathered from user research. Developing these personas helps humanize potential users and brings their goals and behaviors into focus, ensuring that every design choice remains aligned with their needs and expectations.

User Journeys

After creating my persona, the next step was to define user mental models—the internal representations users hold about how a system or process functions—based on insights gathered from user research. Mapping these mental models is crucial, as it allows the design to align more naturally with users’ expectations and behaviors, minimizing confusion and enhancing usability. This process is fundamental in creating a user journey that captures each phase of the user's experience, from their initial interaction with the platform to goal completion. User journeys reveal critical touchpoints, emotions, and decision-making steps, enabling a more targeted design that truly resonates with users.

User Flows

After completing the Define phase, where I clearly identified and framed the problem, I transitioned to the Ideation phase and created User Flows based on the mental models and user stories of my personas. These User Flows provided insights into my users' journeys, helping to pinpoint pain points, streamline workflows, and align features closely with users' goals. The objective was to structure the content of my web app effectively, ensuring that it would be intuitive, accessible, and efficient in meeting users' needs. This approach allowed me to visualize how users would navigate the app, optimizing their experience and enhancing the overall usability of the design.

First Sketches & Low-Fidelity Wireframes

In this phase, I began by translating my ideas into a visual concept through initial sketches, which allowed me to organize the information hierarchy, content structure, and functionality of each page. Once the paper wireframes were complete, I moved on to low-fidelity digital wireframes, prioritizing the core structure and navigation rather than polished visuals and complex features. This approach ensured that the foundational user experience was clearly defined, intuitive, and functional.

Usability Tests

In this phase, I gathered valuable feedback on the prototypes created in earlier stages of the project. I conducted usability tests with six real users to assess their ability to complete specific tasks within the Olive app, identifying areas where the design facilitated or hindered the user experience.

The Participants

The Usability Tests were conducted with six participants. Their personal information is kept confidential, although general demographics can be accessed by clicking here.

The Goals

• Evaluate Intuitiveness: Assess whether the design of the Olive app feels intuitive and familiar to participants, ensuring that users can easily understand the interface and its functionalities without guidance.

• Assess Feature Identification and Navigation: Determine participants' ability to locate and navigate the main features of the app. Evaluate their understanding of the sequential flow leading to these features to ensure a seamless and logical user journey.

• Evaluate Task Efficiency: Measure the time it takes for participants to complete essential tasks, assessing the efficiency of the interface and ease of performing core actions within the app.

• Assess Overall Functionality and Usability: Evaluate the app’s overall functionality and user-friendliness, focusing on whether the features and interactions align with users' expectations to create a smooth, positive experience.

Insights

I conducted several in-person usability tests, using my phone to record the sessions. Participants completed tasks on my computer using Figma's interactive prototype. [Click here to access the test script.] To my surprise, all participants successfully completed the tasks and provided extensive feedback unprompted. I had anticipated needing follow-up questions or reminders to think aloud, but participants shared their opinions and insights about the app’s features freely. I consider these tests highly successful, with the feedback gathered proving invaluable for advancing the project.

Usability Test Report

In the next phase, I compiled a Usability Test Report that summarized key findings from the testing sessions. This report included identified issues and proposed solutions, with issues categorized by impact level—from critical, hindering essential tasks, to minor, with minimal effect on usability. Even purely visual concerns were documented and labeled as cosmetic issues. This structured approach provided a clear understanding of the challenges, guiding focused, meaningful improvements to enhance the user experience.

Iterations

Next, I focused on refining my design by addressing specific user issues identified in the Usability Test Report. I carefully analyzed and categorized user feedback to prioritize the most critical concerns. My goal was to enhance the product's interactions, making them more meaningful and effective for users, while directly responding to their needs and expectations.

Design Documentation: Style Guide

A Style Guide was created to ensure consistency, maintain branding, promote collaboration, improve usability, and clarify design decisions. This document will act as a reference point for future discussions and decisions, reducing ambiguity and ensuring that the design choices made for the Olive app are well-documented and understood.

Final Mockups

After numerous iterations and thorough testing, I arrived at the final mockups for the Olive app. These designs effectively addressed the initially identified problem statement and successfully met the needs and goals of both end-users and business requirements.

Conclusion

The Olive project brought me a lot of learnings that I will carry along with me and apply to my future endeavors as a UX Designer. Some of the highlights I have learned that most resonate are how to deal with constraints in a project.

As a UX designer, I learned how to navigate these constraints and find creative solutions within the given parameters. This taught me how to balance user needs with project goals and deliver a viable design solution. Through usability testing, I learned about the strengths and weaknesses of my design. I was able to gather insights into areas where users struggled or encountered obstacles. These findings allowed me to iterate and improve the usability and accessibility of the design, making it more intuitive and inclusive.

The Olive project also taught me a lot about empathy, teaching me how to empathize with users by putting myself in their shoes so I could develop a better understanding of the challenges, frustrations, and emotions that users might experience while interacting with the product.

This is what helped me to create a more human-centered and inclusive design, aligning my decisions with user expectations and creating solutions to address specific user needs and an intuitive and useful interface to delight users along with their experience within the app.