Case Study 2 Behavioural Design and Social Engagement

Background

Vezeeta is a healthTech startup based in the Middle East, and largely based out of Egypt. The startup has a number of different medical products - including an ePharmacy, clinic management software, a scheduling application for doctors, and most importantly, a mobile application for patients to book doctors.

At Vezeeta, I worked as a Lead UX/UI Designer managing a number of different projects and a team, including but not limited to:

Vezeeta operated in Egypt, in a country where high temperatures and an absence of paved walkways prevent people from getting enough physical exercise, and thus led to an increase in chronic conditions. From our research, we also found out that due to the COVID lockdown, many people had downloaded a number of applications

From a business perspective, Vezeeta was struggling to engage with existing users on a meaningful level - we noticed that users would engage with Vezeeta at a very transactional level (to book a doctor, or order medicine), but would not truly feel connected with our brand.

Thus, we were trying to solve for a number of issues:

1. Nudge our users towards healthier lives
2. Ensure that Vezeeta engages more meaningfully as a brand with its users, driving "sticky" behavior for Vezeeta
3. Generate revenue for Vezeeta

Our strategy - Vezeeta Move and Earn

We went through 3 steps to formulate our product strategy - namely:

Part 1: Research on behavioural design

I conducted extensive market and literature research on behavioural design for fitness - these were our condensed findings.

1. Studies had proven that in order for incentives to drive fitness goals - the incentives were more powerful when tangible and not only intrinsic.
2. From user research, we found that many individuals who engage in fitness activities enjoy sharing their activities on social media platforms, including on Instagram. Some applications who had doubled down on this include Nike Fitness Application as well as Rashaqa, which created a special visual to allow users to "share" their progress with users
3. We also learnt that due to covid, there was a surge in downloading applications to allow users to exercise at home (with such applications occupying the top 3 positions on the Apple app store and Play store.)

Product strategy and ideation

Based on these insights, we defined a product feature set to implement - including:

1.A widget on the home screen of the patient app to track a users footsteps on the mobile app - integrating with a user's mobile

Research backing - mobile users made up about 90% of our users, so we needed to adopt a mobile first approach. Additionally, conversion rates on our mobile application were higher than on mobile web, and so, this initiative was to be rolled out on mobile app only.

2. An integrated loyalty program to serve as the incentive for users

Product backing: In order to generate engagement with our products as well as serve as an incentive, we integrated the Vezeeta Steps counter with the loyalty program. Thus, when users would perform a certain number of steps, they would be awarded with a certain number of loyalty points, which they could then use to order products from Vezeeta's ePharmacy.

The result? Increased order values, increased cross-pollination between Vezeeta's products, and most importantly, meaningful engagement with users.

3. The ability for users to share their progress with others

Research backing - from our user research, we found that extrinsic motivation played a large role at helping users achieve their fitness goals. That is, users often benefited from social validation, and so would choose their fitness goals with friends. Embedding this finding into our product, we decided to incorporate a Share feature into the product with a customized visual.

Some other design decisions made from research include:

-→ Setting the daily step count to 5000 steps (instead of 10,000 steps) - as 5000 steps was a high enough target for a country where walking was minimal.

→ Deciding not to incorporate leaderboards in the MVP, but instead showing a customised ranking visual to the top "walkers" in a city. This was to reduce technical complexity, whilst minimizing development effort.

Our biggest challenges

• Issues with development, particularly for iOS
• Extremely tight timeline → a massive campaign was being launched, and so the development needed to be completed on time before the launch
• There were minor changes between design and development → so the design was not implemented as planned

How we addressed them

• A decision was made to launch the code no-matter-what by the campaign release, and so Android was developed before iOS. This made sense from a business perspective - as around 80% of our mobile users possessed Android devices.
• The development teams - instead of liasing through a product manager - were able to directly be connected to design teams for fast iteration and "fixes"

Impact

Our project was incredibly successful, and led to a number of key results:

1. Session times on our mobile app increased to 3x their length
2. The loyalty program not only led to an increase in the number of ePharmacy orders, but also a great increase in the order value
3. Most importantly, the campaign was very successful at generating user engagement, as the company was seen as creating social impact. Posts were found all over social media celebrating the program, and the company's innovative approach to delivering health benefits to the public.

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Case Study 1 BCG Platinion

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Case Study 2

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Other work

Freelance