WICster
Helping caregivers reach their family's nutritional goals
Timeline: October 2020-July 2021
Role: Project Manager, Tech Lead
Team: 4-7 members
Tools: Figma, React, Firebase
Timeline
February 2021-August 2021
Role
Project Manager
Tech Lead
Team
5 members
Tools
Figma, Firebase, Twilio, Node.js
The Pennsylvania Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (PA WIC) helps low-income families develop healthy lifestyles by providing food vouchers, nutrition services, and other health resources. While over 170,000 PA residents participate each year, most drop out before their eligibility ends.
Key Problems
Our Solution
Receive nutritional information relevant to you and your family.
Nutritional tips are personalized to your family based on topics and the stage your children are in, and recipes are based on your unique PA WIC benefit plan.
Let WICster support you in achieving 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.
WICster will also cheer you on when you’re moving towards reaching your goal and encourage you to keep trying.
Plan your meals and access personalized resources
WICster also helps you plan your day. Using the calendar feature, you can plan recipes and get reminded when the day comes.
Overview
Context
We spent 3 months researching the domain and 2 months designing and testing our proposed solution.
My Role
As the project manager, I facilitated the daily stand-up meetings and came up with a system in Miro to keep the team aligned and accountable while working mostly remotely. I led multiple design sprints and ensured that everyone on the team had a say in the final project direction.
As the tech lead, I worked with the designers and researchers to determine the technical feasibility of our solutions and created a fully-automated SMS chatbot that sent personalized tips to participants.
Through synthesizing interviews with over 20 activist leaders and young adults, we found many members desire more engagement but need clearer guidance from leadership on how they can help.
Skip To Research 1Research 1
Discovering the Problems
PA WIC serves a diverse group of caregivers and pregnant women. There are over 130 local clinics run by 13 different agencies across the state, each with unique challenges.
Our challenge was to analyze the entire WIC experience and find opportunities for PA WIC to intervene and improve the family experience and increase retention and participation.
Understanding PA WIC
In order to understand the current state of PA WIC, we talked to all levels of WIC staff, visited 3 clinics, and did mock-appointments with nutritionists.
To explore the physical space further, our team visited 2 clinics and also received images from 10 additional clinics.
Our goal was to better understand the physical environment of the WIC clinic and waiting room.
Clinic Visits
We engaged with WIC staff throughout the research stage. We interviewed nutritionists and state agency staff. We talked to all 13 stage agency directors to hear their concerns and perspective.
I also set up a meeting with the state director where we presented our progress and discussed his vision of the future of WIC.
WIC Staff Engagements
We went through 3 mock appointments where we pretended to be WIC participants and went through the appointment process with a state nutritionist.
We learned that WIC nutritionists really try to tailor their advice to the individual but have extremely limited time and context.
Mock Appointments
Synthesis
I led the team in creating a stakeholder map to model how the different parts of PA WIC connect and identify the ways the state agency can most directly impact its participants.
After we made the initial version, I realized that the state agency, our client, has very few ways to directly reach participants. When revising the stakeholder map to center around the "degrees of separation," we found that the only place that participants directly interact with PA WIC was the website.
Key Take Aways
Empathizing with Participants
We conducted interviews with over 30 current or former WIC participants, asking about their experiences at different points in the WIC journey. We found that the financial benefits of PA WIC were significant motivators but something prevented them from fully utilizing WIC's nutritional resources.
We talked to 24 participants to gain a holistic understanding of their experiences with PA WIC services and resources.
Participant Interviews
We talked to 4 participants to learn about their ideals, concepts, and knowledge about nutrition and how their habits have changed throughout their lives.
Our goal was to better understand how WIC participants make decisions regarding nutrition and how these decisions manifest in their day-to-day lives.
Narrative Interviews
Our team realized that user-centered research is more than just talking to participants. We aimed to learn from mothers and caregivers in order understand their needs. We did this by enrolling ourselves in the WIC program, simulating parenting by taking care of a realistic baby doll for a few days, and grocery shopping for WIC foods.
Empathy Building
Synthesis
After our first round of participant interviews, we did a round of affinity diagramming and created personas and a customer journey map of the participants WIC experience.
After the Narrative Interviews, we created "Portraitures" of the 4 participants we interviewed. I chose this method because it provides a rich narrative of a few participants' lives to balance the shallow generalities of the personas. Here are a few examples:
“I grew up in the 80s. So back then sugar wasn't [as big a deal]. Even though I played athletics in high school, I've always struggled with my weight. And I know it's because of the sugar. I don't want [my son] to grow up and deal with the things that I've been dealing with.”
Fatima
Fatima is a mother of an adopted son who lives around Erie. She has a son who is now 4 years old and was on WIC for the first year.
I was probably around maybe 19 or 20 and not in the greatest place financially. So there’ve been times where I've had to just feed her and not myself. It was a rough time...
And there've been times when I didn't even have enough money for a nutritional meal. So I had to go to the store and buy... a bag of chips, cheese curls or something, and... a 50-cent juice to give my daughter.
Sam
Sam is a mother of three children from Philadelphia. She works at the Headstart program. She had her first child when she was a senior in high school. She’s now 10 years older and much more health conscious.
Reimagining The WIC Experience
Even though participants were motivated to improve their health and WIC had resources to help, they had a difficult time imagining WIC playing a more significant part in their lives.
We used a number of design activities to probe deeper into their core needs and search for potential opportunities.
We ran a co-design session with participants to assess how they would prioritize additional resources WIC could offer. We had them build a “magic WIC app” by dragging on pre-labeled buttons and thinking-aloud as they made their decisions.
Conceptual Prototyping
Our team ran a co-design workshop with 30 PA WIC staff from Allegheny County. Each group of 10 staff participated in an activity where they brainstormed the long-term impact and goals they had for PA WIC. Then, they came up with “shifts” that would need to happen in order to achieve these goals.
Co-Design Activity
I led our team in generating solutions that addressed each high-level need we saw in participants. The needs were: reducing effort, increasing access, improving integration, and forming habit. We then created 7 storyboards and conducted a rapid exploration of ideas by engaging in a discussion with 7 participants by showing them these storyboards.
Speed Dating
Synthesis
Before heading into the design phase, we came up with dozens of ideas about potential solutions and sorted them by the needs they addressed.
As we were doing this exercise, I noticed that participants' WIC-related needs existed in a hierarchy, similar to Maslow's hierarchy. I plotted our ideas through this framework and presented it to the team. This evolved into the "WIC Mountain," a framework that describes the key challenges that participants faced.
WIC Mountain
We found that achieving PA WIC’s overall goal of improving the long-term health of PA families requires improving in the 4 key areas shown below.
DESIGN
Designing WICster
By the end of the research phase, we had a deep understanding of the users and the challenges they face.
Our next step was to design something that benefited the participants, was feasible for PA WIC, and aligned with PA WIC's goals. This ended up being more psychology than visual design.
Problem Focus
Design Solution
A virtual companion that proactively delivers personalized nutrition education and recipes and utilizes behavioral design techniques to support caregivers in reaching their health goals.
We designed our solution to exist in two modalities: SMS and App
I led the development of a functional SMS chatbot that sends enrolled users daily tips, tip check-ins and goal reminders to help them reach their nutritional goals. Users can also onboard and change preferences through SMS.
The chatbot is an ideal first step for WIC since it is extremely accessible to WIC participants and is a low-cost way for WIC to start proactively engaging with and educating participants between appointments.
We prototyped a WIC App that would enable PA WIC to extend the SMS capabilities and more closely integrate WICster with PA WIC's current systems. It would allow participants to look up tips and recipes and plan meals.
We determined that a visual interface was important for increasing customization and incorporating more behavioral design elements. We were considering designing a responsive webpage rather than an App, but users preferred the ease and accessibility of an app.
Validating WICster
Our first step was to validate that providing participants resources (1) is something they want and (2) can actually lead to behavior changes. Our initial version of WICster was a “Wizard of Oz,” where we manually sent tips through text messages. We conducted a 4-week longitudinal study to test how to most effectively get participants these resources.
Participants Implement Tips At High Rates
In the 4 weeks of sending participants these tips, not only did all 9 participants implement at least one tip into their lives, on average, they implemented 11 of the 25 tips sent to them.
“Pretty much every tip that I was given, we tried it in some shape, or form, or way.”
Proactiveness is Critical...But Too Much is Detrimental
To determine the importance of proactivity, we had a control group where we just emailed a link to pdfs of these pamphlets. We found that only 1 out of 6 participants in the control group clicked on the resources.
However, increasing the amount of texts that were received from 1 to 3 messages per day caused the response rate to drop from 98% to 79%.
Personalization Increases Implementation
When we included the names of the participant and their children in the texts, engagement rate was much higher.
Additionally, personalizing tips based on the participants' interests also increased implementation rates.
Designing For Behavior Change
We explored a number of ways in which we could apply behavioral design principles to increase the effectiveness of our intervention.
Over a number of iterations and rounds of user testing, we incorporated these techniques in different ways. We found that time and attention were especially scarce resources for the caregivers using our app so we had to tailor the design to work within these constraints.
Behavioral Techniques Tested
- Tiny Habits
- Theory of Planned Behavior
- Variable Reward
- Self-Monitoring
- Praise/Reward
We did 3 rounds of usability studies where we had the participants think aloud as they went through a task.
1.
Reduce open ended prompts
Through testing a 5 minute journal in our first prototype, we found that participants preferred something that was quicker and had more structure.
2.
Provide clear guidance and ample praise
The effort of caregivers is often unrecognized. They really value guidance and support as they try to do what’s best for their families.
3.
Lower Barriers To Entry
To make it easy for participants to get value out of the service, we automatically opt them into topics and meal planning.
Developing A Prototype
After creating a database of over 100 tips, I created an automated version of the SMS daily tips and started running it with participants.
It sends enrolled users daily tips, tip check-ins and goal reminders to help them reach their nutritional goals. It also allows new users to onboard completely through SMS and existing users can change their preference through the menu options.
Over 3 weeks of running the prototype, we sent 217 tips and none of the 12 users opted out of the service.
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I knew that PA WIC did not have the time or resources to develop this on their own. If we wanted PA WIC to implement our solution, it needed to be functional. We also wanted to validate that the personalization of tips could be automated and still be effective.
I went into the project with no experience in developing chatbots, let alone personalized ones. But after experimenting with Twilio, I was confident that we would be able to build a working prototype.
I used twilio, firebase, and node.js to enable the personalized tips, and goal check-in through SMS. I found that a combination of twilio studio for conversation flows (shown below) and firebase for the database and functions was the most effective way to develop WICster.
Below are models of the flows included in our final prototype.
Outcome
Final Results/ Next StepS
We passed everything over to PA WIC, including a roadmap on how they can implement the chatbot and eventually expand to developing the app. We also provided ways to measure its effects on the habit change and retention in participants.
Still interested in learning more? Check these out our medium posts or project website.
What Next? Check Out My Other Work
