Transforming Health Through Retail Data: Designing a Personalized Wellness App for Shoppers

Summary

In collaboration with a top 5 retail client, we developed a data-driven health app aimed at enhancing the well-being of shoppers. Partnering with payors, the retailer incentivized Medicaid members to enroll in their Food as Medicine (FAM) program, offering $50 per month for healthy food purchases. To boost sign-ups, the retailer provided free 1:1 dietitian consultations and developed a holistic health app that used purchase history data to create personalized health plans. This app presented actionable food and health-related insights, leveraging the retailer’s unique position and extensive purchase data. I played a key role in this project by creating interview guides, recruiting users, conducting qualitative interviews with consumers, running surveys, and designing the user experience for the app.

To comply with a non-disclosure agreement, pieces of confidential information have been omitted and concealed in this case study.

The Challenge

The retailer aimed to incentivize Medicaid members to enroll in their Food as Medicine (FAM) program, providing each member with $50 per month for healthy food purchases. They benefited financially from each member joining, thanks to payor partnerships, and from the $50 being spent in their stores. To increase sign-ups, they decided to offer free 1:1 dietitian consultations and develop a holistic health app that utilized purchase history data to create personalized health plans. The goal was to leverage the retailer's extensive purchase data to deliver actionable food and health-related insights, thereby enhancing consumer engagement and driving behavior change.

My Role

I played a critical role in this project by:

  • Creating interview guides and recruiting users
  • Conducting qualitative interviews with consumers to inform the design of and test the app
  • Designing and executing surveys to gather quantitative data
  • Translating insights into designs and interactive prototypes

Epics

  • Understanding User Needs:

    Conducted in-depth research to understand the target audience's pain points and their relationship with their current diet. This helped in identifying potential app features could address Medicaid members' challenges around dietary habits and overall health.
  • Identifying Valuable Health Insights:

    Researching which health signals were most effective in driving consent, engagement, and behavior change among users, and integrating them into the app.
  • Optimizing User Experience for Consent:
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    Developing strategies to maximize user comfort in providing consent for data sharing, and ensuring transparency and trust in the app's data handling processes.
  • Enhancing Insight Accuracy and Value:

    Gathering feedback on the perceived value, representativeness, and accuracy of health insights, and implementing improvements based on user feedback to enhance the app's effectiveness.

Epic 1: Understanding User Needs

Insight: At the point of diagnosis, customers struggle to translate doctor recommendations into their daily lives.
Solution: The Health Portal integrates dietician suggestions and input along each touchpoint of the user experience.
Offer a direct way to book a consultation with a dietitian, providing personalized guidance to help translate doctor recommendations into actionable health goals and meal plans.
Curate healthy snack alternatives and specific dietary recommendations from dietitians, making it easier for users to incorporate expert advice into their daily food choices.
Present tailored educational content, offering valuable information and tips that align with specific dietary needs and preferences.
Insight: Customers find it hard to make actionable goals and nutritional plans post diagnosis.
Solution: A meal planner integrated with dietary guidelines from your dietitian consultation, ensuring personalized meal suggestions tailored to your health needs.
Insight: The cost of healthy foods and the perception that healthy foods are expensive deter customers from considering and purchasing them.
Solution: Meal planner provides budget-conscious and dietitian-approved meal suggestions, allowing users to prioritize cost as a factor in tailoring recipes.
Explore and add dietitian-recommended recipes to meal plans, with personalized tagstto emphasize the health benefits and dietary considerations.
Conveying that healthy eating can be affordable by providing adjustable detailed recipes with estimated total budget and cost per serving.
Ensure that they users purchase the exact quantities needed, reducing waste and highlighting the cost-effectiveness of planned meals.
Insight: Customers don’t feel rewarded for the effort they put into developing healthy eating habits, therefore they seek foods that deliver instant gratification.
Solution: A rewards page that provides customers with tangible incentives for their efforts in developing healthy eating habits. By earning points for cooking nutritious meals and redeeming them for products, users feel recognized and rewarded for their healthy choices.
Rewards and benefits page allows users to track points that they earn for purchases that follow their dietary goals.
Purchasing recommended items tailored to fit users' health needs earns them points to buy more food items.
Users can redeem different types of items from the retailer with the points they earn for positive choices.

To understand the target audience's pain points and their relationship with their current diet, I developed recruitment criteria, created interview guides, and conducted 1:1 qualitative interviews with customers of the retailer in the Medicaid population. These interviews aimed to understand their journey post-diagnosis, relationship with their diet, and attitudes around behavior change.

After conducting the interviews, I synthesized the findings and presented the insights to stakeholders. Using these insights, I created detailed journey maps that identified all potential touchpoints where the app could provide value for consumers and facilitate behavior change. I then designed screens for these key touchpoints and ran usability tests with users to prioritize and refine the features, ensuring they effectively addressed user needs.

Epic 2: Identifying Valuable Health Insights

This phase followed our initial research, in which we identified consumers' preferred health-related shopping insights, their impact on behavior change, and which insights drive ongoing engagement. I helped consolidate nearly 300 raw insights based on the client company's capability to surface from customers' shopping purchases. Through designing and running various surveys with consumers, I narrowed these insights down to a manageable set.

Our goal was to identify which health signals were most effective in driving consent, engagement, and behavior change among users, and how we could optimize them. I designed and executed over 10 qualitative interviews with participants from the Medicaid population. In preparation, I created visualizations of the prioritized must-have insights to bring them to life. These insights spanned spending, budgets, purchases, nutrients, predictive health, and the use of benefits through programs like SNAP and Medicaid. I also incorporated recommendations into these insights and included both shopping data from the retailer and data from third-party providers, personalizing the insights at the individual level.

During the interviews, participants were shown these visualizations and asked a series of open-ended questions. They conducted a trade-off activity where they selected their top eight must-see insights and highlighted any insights they did not want to be shown by their retailer, both to themselves and to healthcare providers. This activity also included visualizations of healthcare provider-facing insights to gauge participants' comfort levels with consenting to share their data for better care, which also benefits the retailer in its partnership with health insurance providers.

Epic 3: Maximizing User Comfort & Control

Since the app relies on different types of shoppers' data, we needed to investigate how our target audience viewed consent and third-party data sharing. We sought to uncover effective methods for communicating the benefits of consenting to data sharing with third parties, identify incentives that could encourage consent, and determine the most effective controls to maximize consent rates.

To address these needs, I designed various consent onboarding screens using Figma to test with users. Additionally, I designed, launched, and analyzed surveys and conducted 1:1 qualitative interviews with users to understand their perceptions of consent and third-party data sharing. This led to the development of key privacy principles and the identification of two privacy personas, ensuring the app's design catered to varying comfort levels with data sharing and maximized consent rates.