NUVO SMART WATCH APP

In October of 2022, I conducted a research study for my Advanced UX Research course: the purpose of the study was to drive key enhancements for an imaginary health & wellness company's first wearable technology product - the Nuvo watch. The Nuvo watch is a personal health monitoring device meant to compete with the likes of the Apple and Fitbit watches.

The UX research project was conducted over the course of eight weeks to gather and synthesize data as well as derive meaningful insights from the results.

project goals

Define the target audience and determine their specific needs and motivations
Determine the target audience’s pain points/challenges when it comes to health monitoring watches
Understand the target audience’s ways of using health monitoring watches

usability testing - how

I conducted one-on-one usability interview sessions. Two of the interviews were in-person while the rest were remote. Our research questions focused on three key themes:

Why do people use health monitoring watches?
How do people use health monitoring watches?
What issues or pain points do people experience when using a health monitoring system (watch plus app)?

USABILITY TESTING - WHO

A total of six participants took part in the study.

results

Why do people use health monitoring watches?

Users have health and fitness goals that they want to accomplish. Below are their goals, ranked according to priority:

Lose weight
Be more fit/build muscle
Build stamina
Feel energized

Users want insights into their health-related habits. The most common metrics they track are: number of steps per day and number of hours asleep. Women also track their menstrual cycle using the app.

Incentives and competition motivate users to actively use the watch and its health features. This could be contests at work, or through built-in community features such as friend connectivity, where friends compete with each other on daily step goals. Users want to feel gratified, whether it’s a prize or the feeling of winning the day’s top step count.

How do people use health monitoring watches?

Users check their watch in the morning to see how many hours of sleep they had the night before, and then check the app for basic insights on their quality of sleep
Users track their daily steps
Female users use the app to log their monthly period and track their fertility cycle
Users check text messages and screen calls from their watch if they don’t have their cell phone handy
Users like to check their average heart rate every now and then

What are the challenges/pain points with current smartwatch use?

Battery life is an issue - the smartwatch battery typically lasts 1 - 1.5 days for Apple watch users
Smartwatches get bogged down with unnecessary notifications or features because of the integration with third party apps
Smartwatches can be too big/bulky
Smartwatches are expensive

recommendations

Allow users to customize their experience on the watch and app based on their fitness goals and preferences. At the beginning of the onboarding process, we can ask the user what their fitness goals are (for example, “weight loss, muscle/stamina increase, sleep focus, etc”). We can then make recommendations within the workflow of which health- related metrics should be tracked and how the analytic views are presented to the user. Users can also have the option to skip this step if needed, and communicate that a “General” setting will be implemented for the user. What this entails is that a standardized set of metrics and functionality will be applied to the user experience based on the top findings of our study.These settings can also be changed later on if the user wishes to do so.
Provide user the option to have a battery-saving feature on the watch. The battery saving mode will reduce background activity where applicable, in order to optimize the watch’s battery performance. Further discussion and technical deep dive is needed with hardware and software engineering teams to determine how to achieve this functionality. As always, this feature can be turned off by the user later on if they wish.
Provide user the option to disable third-party app notifications. Apple watch users complain about constantly getting alerts on their watch from third-party apps that they only use on their phone (such as Yelp or Uber Eats). Majority of our target users do not care for these types of notifications. Let us allow the users to disable this functionality during the onboarding workflow or later on if they wish.
Enable a sense of community and competition for the users of our product. Given that competition and incentives/rewards are what motivates our users to continue using the product, we should have fun features within the watch/app that include:
- Importing contacts and data sync between other users of the Nuvo Health watch
- Set up groups between known contacts where users will see their friends’ daily steps and compete with each other for the top spot
- Gratify users who achieve their daily goals using positive alerts
- Have a point system where users who continually achieve their daily goals or win group contests can trade those points for tangible rewards such as discounts or free subscriptions to third party retailers or companies. Rewards can vary in size depending on the timeline (end of the month, six month mark or end of the year) and accumulated number of points. For example, prizes can be: gift cards, discount codes/promotions for fitness clubs (24 hour Fitness) or apps (Peloton), or free Nuvo Health merchandise (t-shirt, pen, etc). This also allows the company to build business relationships or partnerships with other health and wellness companies.