To understand who we’re up against, we looked into both direct competitors (healthy/fitness apps) and indirect competitors (habit changing apps) and analysed them against a set of parameters.

As the research directed, we wanted to further immerse ourselves in the world of health and habit changing by supplementing our findings with relevant literatures and research papers on habit building. We looked at several habit building frameworks, particularly the widely used Hooked Method shown below.

We first sent out a large-scale survey to map common challenges. Based on the quantitative trend of our survey, we then reached out to multiple health communities, facebook groups and our own networks to conduct one-on-one interviews.

It’s interesting to note that the initial brief given by VITA was to encourage people to eat better by going completely plant based. 🥦

However, the research eventually revealed that most people do not correlate healthy eating with just eating plant based food, but rather on maintaining a balanced eating options. Many users instead find it very challenging if eating healthy means being limited to only plant based food.

And so as directed by our findings, we pivoted the goal from encouraging plant-based food diets to another method that resonates and works more effectively with users  — maintaining a well balanced and flexible diet.

After identifying common mindsets and behaviours in our research phase, we developed a persona to succinctly address our group of users. This helps keep our subsequent ideation user-focused and ensure everyone is on the same page on who we are designing for.

To reframe the core problem into actionable solutions, we broke down the problem statement into “how might we” statements for each of the persona’s attributes. So how might we....

To help keep the product laser-focused, we decided to take a step back, zoom out and consider the various product goals and objectives of the various parties involved.

To further prevent a potential feature-bloat, we created a feature roadmap and categorise them using the MoScoW framework and Impact - Effort. This helps determine the product vision ahead of the MVP stage as well.

To make our app accessible even to the older demographics, we recognise that the app structure should be kept as simple as possible. Utilising a simple card sorting exercise, we compartmentalised the app’s navigation with a broader width rather than depth to help users discover features more easily.

We rapidly drafted a paper prototype to validate design decisions and make iterations. The main goals for these tests are to validate user flow, identifying grows and glows for the user interfaces, and to check the clarity of content and hierarchy.

We usability tested with 10 people who had use cases for tracking their progress, setting up their journey, and finding support. Places where our assumptions broke down were:

By using the metaphor of caring for a plant, VITA helps to physically represent one’s personal health into a more visible, tangible form. Drawing parallel on how our body behaves very much like a plant — we can get healthy or sick based on what we absorb as our nutrients, we bloom better when we’re giving it the right support and care.

Research plenty but also prioritise - Although this is a research heavy project, we spent almost 80% of our time conducting literature research which mostly ended up not being relevant to our MVP / users. Getting insights and feedbacks from direct user testing proved to be equally valuable as well.


Focus on the high level mindsets/motivations - While building the attributes to our main persona, there was a constant struggle of making sure our persona is not becoming too generic / over encompassing of other personas. By focusing more on the mindsets, we were able to create more distinguishable user personas.