HabitAware

HabitAware

Strategy and prototyping for a company with a mental health wearable

Overview

Product

HabitAware helps those with subconscious body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) with a smart bracelet, Keen2, that helps users become aware of habitual tendencies such as nail biting. The wearable is accompanied by a mobile app that is used to configure the device’s understanding of user-specific gestures and create haptic reminders when these gestures are detected. HabitAware has grown and expanded its BFRB support system ecosystem to include:

  • Apple Watch app

  • Online community

  • Family resources

  • Mastercourses

  • Peer Coaching

Context

When I joined the project, the company was already established with a group of product offerings: the wearable, courses, and an online community. Everything was advertised on its site. My goal was to create a design strategy to help users understand how the products fit along a path.

Goals

Create a design strategy and prototypes to help HabitAware users access their offerings and understand them as working together (instead of only purchasing one item - such as the bracelet without the courses).

Research Methods

    • User research interview

    • Conducting market research

    • Customer journey mapping

    • Interactive prototype design

Research

Method 1 - User research interview

I started the research for HabitAware with a user interview with Aneela, HabitAware’s founder. She gave more context about the history of the company and its users’ needs. I learned that many users purchase the wearable bracelet from the site without knowing about how the bracelet is connected to the courses and community. This can frustrate users when they don’t have the full experience. I also learned that medical providers were a strong partnership area for HabitAware. 

This helped inform our competitor research - the goal was to see how other solutions presented themselves and learn more about BFRBs. 

Method 2 - Market research

With my team, we researched technology as a tool to build habits, the background of BFRBs, and looked at HabitAware’s website. I also looked at TrichStop, a HabitAware competitor and noticed that they focus on marketing their programs by talking about opinions of medical providers to build trust with users. 

Method 3 - Customer journey mapping

With the research, I conducted a customer journey map that focused on user’s emotions and desired outcomes in the discovery and purchase/onboard stages of the journey. 



Customer journey map

Prototyping

Interactive Prototype

For the interactive prototype, I focused on redesigning a touchpoint of the company. Based on my research and the founder’s user interview, I decided to focus on the touchpoint of mental health practitioners.  

  1. I brought the “Professionals” page that was targeted to mental health professionals out of the menu, where it was hidden under the menu dropdown “Beyond Keen 2” and moved this information to the main page

  2. I focused on both mental health providers and end users as one approach on the main page as a way to build more credibility for the company with end users and also further attract mental health professionals as a user group. 

This refocuses the information on the front page and helps build product trustworthiness without all of the graphics and user testimonials that keep repeating themselves and makes the user’s attention more focused.

Learning and Next Steps

This was a case where the founder Aneesa was very close to the user story for the company. I learned from this case that this can be enough for a first product, but to grow and present the user paths as the company grows, broader user needs must be considered. Not everyone has the same amount of understanding or will follow the same path. 

For next steps, I recommend redesigning the FAQ section to include a section for providers’ questions. Another step can be redesigning the content strategy of the website to have more of a medical and informational language usage, as opposed to language that is more in the tone of marketing. Having an ethos (credibility) versus pathos (emotion-based) content strategy is a way to clarify information for users. 

High fidelity wireframe