iOS Health app redesign

The Health app consolidates data from your iPhone, Watch, and third-party apps you already use, so you can view all your progress in one convenient place.

Objective

Propose feature improvements that increase the iOS Health app’s DAU.

Design Process followed — Double diamond

Research

After getting the brief I started by understanding about mhealth and where apple health stands. I did a competitor analysis of top fitness apps by monthly active users.

What Is Health Tracking?

The term health tracking comprises of general wellness such as collection and analysis of various data points related to one’s health like steps, calories, altitude, and sleep patterns and monitoring health conditions for finding doctors, monitoring symptoms in patients, medication reminders etc.

Where does Apple Health stand?

Apple health is basically a data aggregator, and it collects various health data from various apps and displays it visually through charts and graphs.

Competitor analysis

Statista

Looking at the above list and going through top charts of App Store and Play store, I analysed the following apps:

Key Findings

1. These apps are simple to use and have limited features.
2. All these apps have step counter on top and calculate calories burned and distance travelled from no. of steps.
3. Other features common are sleep tracking, food intake, activity/exercise tracking and Menstrual cycle,
4. Have gamification inbuild and ask the user to set goals during onboarding.

What can be improved in apple health?

The biggest flaw is it’s made for everyone in mind and has the generic tracking of digital health without surfacing the most used features.

1. Not many people know about if the app exists.
2. It’s a data aggregator, so people use it once a day or less to just check their stats. This leads to less DAU.
3. It could be made simpler and surface popular features.

Solution

The best way to increase DAU for Health app is to increase awareness and improve retention.

According to the research done by Google, the best way to improve retention is by using better onboarding and timely notification.

1. I added an extra step in onboarding to select your favourites. This increases awareness about the features in apple health and also fills up the home screen.

2. Another improvement is to have notifications, one to tell the users that health app exists on their phone, hence increasing awareness.

Since Health app aggregates data from health apps, a push notification can be sent when a new app can be integrated.

When there is no engagement for a few days, a motivational notification can be sent to bring the user back to the app.

3. In the summary page, moved steps to the top and other stats below it. The fixed position of the data makes it easier for a user to find it easily, which is difficult in the time-based order Health app puts the features in.

Further steps

• Do user testing for the above improvements
• Carefully monitor the numbers to check if the improvements increase DAU
• Add more articles about health on the home page and more info about steps and other features,
• Introducing gamification to increase retention.

Thanks for reading!