BACKGROUND

About

ALLHealth is a smart health device management application that is mainly used to connect the company's medical device devices such as body fat scales and oximeters sold on Amazon to monitor the user's health. At the time I took over, the App was already completed and running in its initial version.

Goals

1. Add a module for weighing children and pets.
2. The design of this module needs to be simple but approachable；

My Role

Interaction design, User interface design, Research

SOLUTION

The weighing module for children and pets requires more scenarios and details to be considered. In the process of designing, besides referring to some similar products such as Yolanda and Withing App, I also reviewed a lot of data and information together with the operation staff, including children's physical growth data, legal risks of minors' accounts and so on. Finally, the whole module is divided into the following 5 major blocks to plan and design.

1. Reorganize user account types

The weights of children and pets need to be recorded separately, so two new and different accounts need to be added. And the functions and data of these two accounts should be different from the regular accounts.

Children's Account:

1. Considering the U.S. legal regulations and the actual situation, we first determined that the main User of the App must be over 16 years old. When adding members, 16 years old is used as the dividing line between child member and normal member, and Child member is represented by a specialized icon
2. Since our body fat scales are not able to measure data other than weight for users under the age of 10, we have categorized the entire CHILD MEMBER into two types: under the age of 10, and 10 to 16, with the two accounts differing in terms of weighing and data presentation.

Pets’ Account：

Pet accounts are relatively simple, requiring only weight data, and there is no age classification.

Main interface overview

2. Weighing module for children

The weighing module for children is the most important part of this design. I have divided the weighing process into 3 cases according to the weighing habits of children in different ages, which are parent-assisted mode, independent standing mode, and regular weighing mode.

1. Under 3 years old: There are two modes, the parent-assisted mode and the independent standing mode. Parental participation is required throughout the weighing process;
2. 3 to 10 years old: Independent standing weighing mode is predominant, while taking into account the child's autonomous behavior, i.e., if the weighing process is not followed on the app, parents can also be allowed to manually assign the results;
3. 10 to 16 years old: Regular weighing mode, no longer requiring parental guidance.

Main interface overview

3. Child weighing results and data presentation

This part of the project focuses on displaying weighing results and charts for users with children under 10 years old. Before designing, I researched some parents and realized that hospitals in the US usually give some recommendations based on CDC standards when children are weighed, and parents also pay attention to this.

Design Ideas:

1. Based on the feedback from the research, I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate this data comparison into our children's weigh-in results and charts, which also solve the problem of too little content on the weigh-in results page for children under 10 years old.
2. On the chart page for children under 10 years of age, 3 CDC standard lines are added directly to the graph as a comparison, while the historical weighing results are visualized below.

Main interface overview

4. Weighing module for pets

Because it's not a specialized pet weighing App, the initial version only considers the parent-assisted weighing mode, and has Weight as the only data. Therefore, the design will mainly focus on the visual aspect.

Main interface overview

5. Emotional Design

As the child weighing module is highly age related. It occurred to me that it could be on the user's birthday, which would give the user a feeling of being noticed. In addition, children's height is an important reference for weight, so it is necessary to add a reminder for measuring height.

Birthday Reminder

Birthday reminders are categorized into 5 basic styles for boys and girls under 10 years old, boys and girls over 10 years old, and pets.

Visually, different theme colors were designed for the 5 different identities, embellished by balloon ribbons and other elements with Lottie micro-animation to add to the ambiance.（Click here to watch）

Age reminders for Child Users

The ages of 3, 10 and 16 make a difference for family members in terms of usage and membership type. So when a family member reaches these key age points, there is a special reminder in the message center.

The reminder card design is categorized into male and female versions, and designed with 4 different age images: toddler, child, teenager and young adult. Each time we move up in age, a big 'user' greets a small 'user', representing that 'user' has entered a different stage.

Reminders for measuring children's height

Children's height is always growing, so height needs to be recorded and updated in time. Therefore, I designed this measurement reminder, users can set the frequency, the default is once in 3 months. Each reminder is displayed as a notification in the notification center.

The visual design is divided into two versions for boys and girls, with height represented through cuter elements such as giraffes and rulers.

SUMMARY

Challenge

1. During the discussion stage, team members suggested to fully refer to the senseless weighing mode of similar apps, that is, as long as the time between two weighing is less than 5 minutes and the weight difference is more than 3kg, the weight difference will be taken as the weighing result of children/pets. But after many tests, this is not only prone to errors, but also more costly for user education. Therefore, I propose to use the step-by-step guided approach, which is compatible with senseless weighing at the same time.
2. During the design of the weighing results and charts for children, we had a heated internal discussion about whether to refer to the CDC or not. Because if we did, we needed to use CDC's API additionally, and it would also increase the amount of data calculation. However, the head of operations and I both thought it was a highlight feature, so we spent many days researching CDC related data and documents, and made a detailed interaction description to discuss with the developer, who eventually agreed with our proposal.
3. In the pet weighing module, some colleagues proposed to design different types of pets such as cats, dogs, rabbits, etc. in visual and sound effects respectively. I propose that there is no need to do now, on the one hand, we can not take into account the equality of many types of pets; on the other hand, we do not specialize in pet weighing, there is no need to spend time doing it in the early stage of the App.

Highlights

1. Well-guided weighing process：The weighing process considered a variety of scenarios, and the parent-assisted weighing mode was simulated several times to minimize the error rate. During testing, this feature was appreciated by the rest of the team.
2. Children's weighing results design got rave reviews：The integration of children's weighing results with CDC standards was a highlight of the entire module and was eventually added into the e-commerce page's copywriting；
3. Emotional design increases user experience and approachability：When we think of children and pets, we think of love and warmth. Therefore, in the design of the weighing guide process and weighing results, a more intimate and emotional illustration design is used. In addition, we strengthened the display of user growth, which not only improves the user experience, but also increases the scenarios for users to use the body fat scale. All of these have been well received by some parent users.