WICster
A virtual companion who empowers
WIC families to create healthy habits
OVERVIEW
TIMELINE
February - August 2021
TEAM
Product Manager
UX Researcher
Product Designer
Conversation Designer
UX Engineer
MY ROLE
UX Researcher & Conversation Designer
User Research
Conversation Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
BACKGROUND
A 7-month-long CMU MHCI Capstone Project. Working with faculty mentors and our client, Pennsylvania WIC, we created an SMS chatbot and a native app that solves the current challenges PA WIC had.
Empower WIC families to create healthy habits and improve their nutritional goals
Our team analyzed the total service experience of PA WIC participants and discovered opportunities to improve their experience and increase participation. I conducted an extensive user research to understand the problems participants faced and designed, tested, and validated a solution that helped them better utilize WIC’s resources to reach their family’s nutritional goals.
THE CHALLENGE
Meet PA WIC
PA WIC (Pennsylvania Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) is a federally funded program that provides food vouchers, nutrition services, breastfeeding support, and other health resources to mothers and children from infancy to age 5.
While PA WIC provides food benefits and nutritional resources for eligible children up until the age of 5, there is a steep dropout rate once the child turns 1, and therefore, PA WIC is experiencing a low retention rate.
THE SOLUTION
Learn nutritional information with ease
We know that as a caregiver, you already have enough on your plate and that your time is extremely valuable.
With WICster, you don’t have to worry about searching for trustworthy nutritional information. Tips and recipes are sent directly to you through text. You can control when and how often you receive the texts.
Only receive what’s relevant to you and your family
WICster makes sure to only send you information that is valuable to you and your family. Receive tips on feeding transitions, picky eating, teething, portion size, food and, sleeping safety, and more!
Nutritional tips are based on your preferred topics and the stage your children are in, and recipes are based on your unique PA WIC benefit plan.
Feel good about your progress
Raising a family is hard and deserves acknowledgment and celebration. WICster will cheer you on when you’re moving towards reaching your goal and be there to encourage you on rainy days too.
Monitor your goals
Enter a goal you and your family are working on, and WICster will keep you on track! He’ll help you set an achievable, measurable, and attainable goal, send you reminders, and allow you to track your progress. Change or edit your goal at any time!
Share your feedback to receive better content
WICster asks if you found the nutritional tip useful or not and allows you to edit the topics of tips you receive. Your feedback will help PA WIC nutritionists to develop and update the content of the tips so that they can be more helpful to you.
THE PROCESS
USER RESEARCH
Exploring the Problem
To explore the current state of PA WIC, we reached out to WIC participants and conducted semi-structured interviews to learn what motivates or hinders them from going to a WIC clinic, how different touch points in the WIC journey affect the experience, and how they interact with WIC services.
Understanding the Experience
User-centered research is more than just talking to participants. We wanted to better understand the lives of participants as well as the PA WIC experience.
CLINIC VISITS
Visited WIC clinics to better understand the physical environment of the clinic and waiting room and met a few nutritionists and staff.
MOCK APPOINTMENTS
Enrolled myself in the WIC program speaking only Korean to experience how ESL participants go through the enrollment process.
SIMULATING PARENTING & GROCERY SHOPPING
Simulated parenting by taking care of a realistic crying baby doll for a few days and went grocery shopping for WIC foods.
Reimagining the WIC Experience
We conducted several co-design activities to engage with PA WIC participants and staff to better understand their challenges and priorities within WIC.
CONCEPTUAL PROTOTYPE
Asked participants to build a “magic WIC app” to assess how they would prioritize additional resources WIC could offer.
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP
With 30 PA WIC staff, brainstormed the long-term impact and goals they had for PA WIC to better understand what our client was envisioning for the future.
SPEED DATING
Presented storyboards that address both high-level needs and solutions to rapidly explore different concepts and participants’ interactions with an idea.
INSIGHTS FROM RESEARCH
To make it to the top of the mountain, participants must overcome significant obstacles.
THE PROBLEM
How can we make resources
easy, accessible, and integratable?
And ultimately, help them
develop a long-term healthy habit?
Participants were interested in the resources PA WIC had but found them inaccessible. We believed that proactively providing participants with these resources could increase the value and effectiveness of PA WIC’s educational offerings and keep participants in the program longer.
Our initial version of WICster was a “Wizard of Oz” - we manually sent tips through text messages. We conducted a 4-week longitudinal study to test how to most effectively get participants these resources.
IDEATION & VALIDATION
We deep-dived into behavior change research and talked with many experts in the field.
01. Proactivity
Making healthy decisions should not be overwhelmingly difficult and there has to be a trigger – something that prompts caregivers to carry out a behavior.
We delivered nutritional resources from WIC pamphlets in two different ways.
Proactivity reduces the effort and burden placed on participants trying to learn.
There is a fine line between effective nudging and nagging.
02. Content
What makes a good tip?
What health information is being shared
Why the information is valuable
How to implement the information
03. Tone & Emotion
Designing WICster’s Personality
We aimed to make the WICster companion supportive and non-judgmental. We want participants to feel empowered and confident in the health choices they make for their families.
To ensure that our tone and voice are encouraging, we conducted several rounds of user testing and adjusted the tone and voice to mimic that of an encouraging, yet not overbearing, companion that uses positivity to motivate our users. We also incorporated emojis effectively to humanize WICster.
04. Personalization
What Impact Does Personalization Have?
Relevance leads to increased implementation and engagement.
The health advice sent must constantly change to match the situational context of a parent. But how personalized does it need to be?
One group received generalized tips that weren’t as tailored to their health interests while the other group received health tips that were highly personalized and aligned with their selected health goals.
05. Increasing Agency
More to Changing Behavior
After validating that sending daily tips led to high rates of implementation, we decided to expand on this foundation to incorporate more behavioral change elements.
Based on the behavior change research, we chose the most promising methods and created storyboards to test with participants and found that we need to ensure that changes were long-lasting and to give participants more agency over setting and monitoring their family’s nutritional goals.
DESIGNING & PROTOTYPING
INITIAL SKETCHING
Based on the validation from the behavior change research, our team sketched a wireframe that incorporates the findings.
DRAFTING CONVERSATION LOGIC
Considering the interaction goals and the user data that needs to be captured, we drafted a rough conversation flow for the SMS solution.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Referring to already existing PA WIC pamphlets and resources, we created an extensive database for the tips. The tips were then categorized by topic, children’s age, and user types.
Designing SMS Chatbot
The SMS chatbot sends daily tips, tip check-ins, and goal reminders to help participants reach their nutritional goals. It also allows new users to onboard completely through SMS and existing users can change their preferences through the menu options.
ONBOARDING
Information is collected to onboard participants onto the solution (caregiver’s name, child’s information). To reduce any friction that might prevent participants from signing up for the service, we designed the onboarding to be simple and concise.
SELECTED CONVERSATION FLOW
GOAL-SETTING
Optional in the onboarding to make the onboarding more efficient and quick. It asks if the caregiver wants to keep the goal they set with a nutritionist or set a new goal. If they want to set a new goal, WICster guides the user to set a goal.
NUTRITIONAL TIP
We send out a nutritional tip and allow participants to edit the topics of the tips and share feedback on each tip. This allows PA WIC nutritionists to develop and update the content to be more useful to participants.
SELF-MONITORING (GOAL CHECK-IN)
The goal check-in serves as a reminder and allows participants to monitor their progress with goals. Depending on the user’s response, WICster either praises users for completing their goals or encourages them to continue to reach their goals.
SELF-MONITORING (TIP CHECK-IN)
The tip check-in reminds participants of previous tips. If the tip was sent as a reminder but still not implemented, the user will be asked if they want to be reminded again later. This system will successfully nudge users to try implementing tips.
MILESTONE-RELATED
When the child turns 6 months old, it sends this message to kindly inform the caregiver of what changes they can expect from the child. It also proactively asks if they want to receive tips related to the child’s development stage. We wanted the user to perceive WICster as a “mind reader” that proactively suggests and provides help before being asked to.
IMPLEMENTATION
Automating WICster
We built out a functional automated version of the SMS chatbot and ran it with participants. For about 3 weeks, 14 participants received tips from WICster and none opted out of the service.
THE IMPACT
WICster’s value to WIC
In the past, participants had a limited number of appointments with PA WIC, which has led to a perception that “WIC is just another welfare program.” Yet, with the advent of WICster, participants were able to receive personalized resources in a more accessible and effective way. And PA WIC nutritionists receive participants’ feedback on their resources, which has helped them to continuously improve on their resources.
PRE-WICSTER
POST-WICSTER
REFLECTION
CHALLENGES
Figuring out the right voice and tone of the conversational agent
Incorporate emojis in the chat message to humanize WICster
Continuously develop the content that is derived from the understanding of the users’ contextual needs
Addressing the visual constraints
The SMS chat interface has constraints in some use cases. For instance, when users need to adjust their preferences in the frequency of receiving messages/notifications, they expect to go to Settings (visual interface) to adjust the preferences with one click or touch and receive quick visual feedback. SMS chatbot isn’t an ideal interface for this use case as it’s difficult for users to even discover this feature and go back to this conversation (goal of making adjustments in Settings) unless it’s prompted by the chatbot.
MY KEY TAKEAWAYS
Designers often get constrained by the technology/interface. Technology is a medium to change and improve human lives. Ultimately, it’s important to focus on the problem we’re trying to solve for the users and consider what technology would be the most effective to make the most impact.
Although our team initially delivered an SMS chatbot as a solution, we confronted some constraints (lack of discoverability due to the limited visual interface) of its technology and came up with another solution (a mobile app with both chat and visual interfaces) to address these issues.
Through this project, I learned that a conversational interface doesn’t always provide the most convenient, natural, and effective experience for users. And as a conversation designer, I realized how critical it is to consider why a conversational interface is the right interface for a certain problem before jumping into a solution with a designated interface in mind.