AIA Vitality

Led the designs of the Mental Wellbeing section of the AIA Vitality mobile app: a health and wellbeing app provided to AIA insurance customers

About the AIA Vitality app

The AIA Vitality app is offered to customers who have insurance with AIA. It is primarily a health app that rewards users with points when they log evidence of leading a healthy lifestyle (for example, logging number of steps taken, how many minutes they have meditated and the like). Users can then use these points to avail a range of shopping vouchers, gyms and flight discounts and even discounts on their premiums.

Introduction of Mental Wellbeing section

Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and with it, the rise of mental health issues, a Mental Wellbeing section was proposed to be incorporated into the app. I was in charge of leading the UI designs for this new section.

The Mental Wellbeing section had been conceptualised by the Product team to include the following:

A mental wellbeing assessment, which would segment users based on the level of help they require. This ranged from users who did not need any help when it came to their mental wellbeing, to users who were in critical need of mental health assistance immediately;
Based on the assessment, users would receive personalised feedback which pointed out areas that they could work on to improve their mental health. The app would also provide resources such as relevant articles and resources at this point;
Users would get access to learning content, interactive activities and the opportunity to talk to a mental health coach for free; and
The users would also get a personalised 'mental wellbeing plan' which would just be the Learn, Act and Chat components re-arranged according to which segment the user fell into.

What we did

I was tasked with taking the dense, clinically approved product specification document that outlined what would be contained within the Mental Wellbeing offering and design it using the AIA design system, and keep it consistent with the rest of the AIA Vitality app.

Collaborating with the product team, BAs and the Mental Wellbeing partners, I produced the user flow and the designs for the Mental Wellbeing offering. These designs went through 3 rounds of usability testing and iterations to arrive at a highly successful usability score of 88.9 out of 100 in the last round.

Round 1

For the first round, we decided to design and test the assessment and feedback section only. The assessment was around 70 questions, and some of the questions were deeply personal. It was important to test the following with users:

The large number of questions contained within the assessment,
Whether the AIA Vitality points they were to receive for the assessment was enticing enough to go through so many questions,
How users would react to the personal questions, and
If users found the feedback useful or not.

Findings

The usability of the assessment was good, but could be better.

I had modelled the questionnaire based on the default Survey Monkey questionnaire style that jumped from one question to the next when users clicked the 'Next' button. At the end of every page, users were confronted with the 'crisis pathway' that had Lifeline contact details. Users quickly got annoyed when this was repeated at the end of every page.

The personal questions needed more context, or to be removed altogether.

Some users were uncomfortable answering questions that asked whether they had any chronic illnesses, or about the health of their family. They didn't understand why these questions were required in a mental health assessment. They were also doubly concerned because they didn't want to share this information with their insurance provider.

The usability of the feedback was received well, however the content within the feedback was thought to be very generic.

Users felt the there was no point to receiving personalised feedback if there were no interventions within the Mental Wellbeing section that they could use to act on their feedback.

I iterated on the designs of the assessment: I removed the 'Next buttons' and made the pages scrollable. I also suggested providing context around some questions, which would need to be approved by the clinical team.

For the feedback, it was suggested to include more action points that users could use to improve on their mental wellbeing. We decided to integrate relevant articles that users could peruse to help with their mental health in this section.

Round 2

In this round, we tested a shorter version of the iterated assessment, the learning content, interactive activities and the access to a mental heal coach sections of the Mental Wellbeing offering. We also tested the personalised mental wellbeing plan. This round we tested the following with 7 users:

The usability of the entire offering.
How the mental wellbeing plan would be received by users.
How users received the Learn, Act and Chat components. Did they find it useful? Was anything missing?

Findings

Overall, the proposition was received quite well. Users were appreciative of a mental wellbeing offering in these uncertain times.
Interactive activities was disappointing to many users as they thought they would be able to do these activities within the AIA Vitality app. They said downloading more apps and signing up to them was a cumbersome process.
The concept of chatting to mental health coach was appreciated, however users said they required a lot more detail before they would take up this offering. Being such as sensitive area, this was understandable.
The mental wellbeing plan was not recognised as a plan. The simple re-arrangement of the Learn, Act, Chat components wasn't enough to signify to users that they needed to complete them in certain order. We found that users would rather interact with the area they found most interesting - most users clicked into the interactive activities first without any prompting.

Based on user feedback, we iterated on the designs. I provided more context around the Act section so users knew exactly what to expect before they clicked into it. For the Chat section, I provided comprehensive answers to all the questions that came up during testing so users would be well-informed of what they were going to get.

It was becoming clear to us that the mental wellbeing plan wasn't user-centric in that it didn't contain the level of personalisation that users expected. We decided to test it with one last iteration to see if users would understand that they needed to interact with the Learn, Act and Chat sections in a particular order. To that end, I provided more context around why, in medical terms, users should follow the plan.

Round 3

The third round of usability testing was conducted with 10 users. This time we tested the entire offering, from assessment through to Learn, Act and Chat, the Feedback and the mental wellbeing plan.

Findings

The design iterations were received very well. The iterated designs received a high usability score of 88.9 out of 100 and as such, we only noticed minor changes that needed to be made.
Re-framing 'Act' to include the fact that it included apps set user expectation so that they weren't disappointed when they clicked into it. In fact, the re-framing served to kindle their interest for the activities they would be able to do in this section.
The major flaw that was observed in the offering was the Mental Wellbeing plan - users still couldn't understand why they had to complete the Learn, Act and Chat activities in a certain order, especially since there was no further personalisation than that within those sections.

Based on the user feedback, we removed the mental wellbeing plan for the initial launch of the offering within the app.

Conclusion and next steps

The Mental Wellbeing offering within the AIA Vitality app will be released in March of 2022. Users will be able to complete an assessment, after which they will receive personalised feedback and action points to improve their mental health. They will also have access to the Learn, Act and Chat intervention playground which will help them take steps to improve their mental wellbeing further, if they choose to.

The mental wellbeing plan is being worked on to include more personalisation for users based on their assessment results.