My journey at ALVUM
ALVUM build personalised digital health solutions to help sufferers of long-term gut health conditions improve their quality of life.
Role: UX Researcher, Product Designer
Overview
This was a nine-month-long project for a digital health service ALVUM.
We were studying UX Design and applying our knowledge to the project right away. Our team consisted of three UX Designers with different backgrounds: UI, Web, and Graphic Design combined with degrees in psychology and medicine. Hands down, we were a dream team for this project.
The Problem
ALVUM provides a personalised health solution for people with food intolerances. The website was launched before the Food Intolerance Program, so the structure of the website wasn't suitable for e-commerce purposes, and that caused problems with sales, as well as poor design solutions and weak overall UX of the website and the product itself.
We applied many practices and research methods throughout the project to accomplish the best possible results. It was quite a challenge to introduce solutions while trying to balance the state of business, financial capabilities, and problems we were trying to solve.
I am currently rewriting my case study on this past experience of mine, but I guess if you're reading this, you might be interested in what I did during this project.
The Process
Discovery process
Interviews, guerilla research, contextual inquiry, surveys, 5-second tests of the previous version of the website
We solved the problems of users with IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome), so we used several approaches to gather data.
- Online communities of people with food intolerances & IBS
- Cafes and places focused on healthy food (Surprisingly, we meet lots of people with this problem or issues similar to a food intolerance)
- Stakeholder arranged a few meetings with people suffering from IBS.
After collecting all this data, we transformed it into our personas, empathy map, and CJM. 5 second tests helped us to evaluate current design and pinpoint not only problems we had to tackle, but also it helped in the future to prioritise features of the future website.
After completing the discovery phase, we realised that it would be easier not to redesign the website but start with it from scratch.
Feature prioritisation & Prototyping
To decide on our MVP, we took the approach of creating EPICs and user stories and later prioritising possible features using the kano model, as you can see down below.
During the prototyping stage of the project, we first aligned our vision by creating the information architecture of our website.
Also, we had a possibility to try card sorting methodology to sketch out the potential layout of the website. Can't say it was effective since we were building an e-commerce website, but it was a good experience to learn this methodology in depth.
Usability Testing & Final Design
Our prototype ran through several stages of user testing with our users. We tracked not only the general perception of the website and its usability (task success) by users but also the metrics like the time taken to accomplish the task.
Step by step we were able to finalise our design.
Link to the prototype on the personal website of my colleague
Unfortunate events
After finalising our design and even developing our website, we faced an unfortunate event that put the final nail in the coffin of ALVUM startup. The pandemic struck Spain dramatically, and startup owners lost all their investors.
Learnings
No matter what, we believe our team did a great job revamping project from scratch, and it had all chances of becoming successful. I see this past opportunity as a great serious starting point for my career as a UX Researcher. I became interested in this field and had an opportunity to dive deep into research methodologies I learned during my master's. It helped to get a general sense of the most effective practices that can be applied to specific tasks, as well as learn the mistakes like running card sorting tests without giving enough context.
