HealthPad

Jo Ramsden, a Project Analyst at Cornwall Council and Yoga Teacher has seen the damage people are putting on their mental and physical health through a lack of listening to their bodies. This is leading to a massive effect on people’s health and wellbeing on a global scale, causing long-term physical and mental health problems. 

An in-depth study for the UK Health and Wellbeing Work Survey saw a shocking 37% increase in stress-related absence at work.

Jo for much of her life has been on a solo mission to promote body awareness through yoga. But this wasn’t enough, triggering an idea to go straight to the source of one of the problems… The smartphone.

Forming the HealthPad team

Jo founded a team to help bring this idea to life. Introducing Dan and Judith.

Dan suffered mentally and physically from working in stressful environments for twenty years, then learned how to apply holistic methods to combat his stress. 

When Dan joined the Council, he met Jo and got talking about the HealthPad idea. 

With Dan’s experience and enthusiasm for the idea, he became HealthPad’s ‘top geek’ to support the digital side of the project.

Judith, who became a friend of Jo’s after meeting at a yoga retreat also shared the same beliefs. And as a language therapist, yoga teacher, trained counsellor and hypnotherapist, she has dedicated much of her life to helping people manage and overcome stress in their lives. When Jo mentioned this project, she couldn’t wait to help.

Three founders, ready to make it happen.

Zero to £12,920 through Crowdfunding

With the founding team formed, they had an issue. Money.

Where do you start? 

Well through Crowdfunder of course.

The HealthPad team all have full-time jobs, but this didn’t stop them. In their spare time, they took swift action setting up their campaign on Crowdfunder with key messaging, building out their app idea and creating introductory branding, before pushing the campaign live.

Through marketing their Crowdfunder with their networks, they started to gain traction. People were loving their idea and immediately gave them support!!

They then set out to apply for a grant and match funding programmes, securing three funding programmes: CLLD grant, Cornwall Social Inclusion and the other from NatWest Back Her Business Fund, bringing them up to a total of £12,920, well over their goal of £10,000.

What a result! 

This is where we come in. Hiyield was brought on board to help them create a beautiful brand and mobile app in order to change the health of today.

‘Hiyield was recommended to us, and from the first conversation, we knew they really got the idea and we loved their energy’ said Jo.

To get the look and feel of HealthPad right, UX & UI Lead, Nick Voke took the HealthPad team on a design journey. 

Before anything, Nick scheduled a one-to-one with Judith, which was praised by Jo saying, ‘Judith loved the session with Nick, where she was able to show some of the techniques they would use in the product, and through this Nick was brilliant at understanding what the product was about.’

Nick then crafted three branding identity design routes with a strong focus on three keywords for the HealthPad team to choose: Playful, Strong, Optimistic.

Building out the brand and mobile app

My Health Pad to HealthPad

A change that happened early on was a tweak of the brand name. Nick suggested to the team to drop the ‘My’ and bring together Health and Pad to create, HealthPad! This created a name that’s is punchy and straight to the point… HealthPad!

Complete branding pack

Nick created a set of assets full of typography, illustrations and colours that can be used throughout the app and marketing.

Body, Breathe, Mind, Change

Through Discovery and a process of Empathy Mapping with the team, Discovery Lead Neil identified the main functionality of the app putting together an Information Architecture with the user’s needs and goals centred at the heart of the experience:

• Sign up and sign in
• How to use the app introductory pages
• Four quadrants on a navigation bar: Change, Body, Breath, Mind
• Each quadrant to have a grid of assets on the page of voiceovers and a video follow along

Defining the user journey through wireframes

Using Figma, Nick built out the user journeys based on the information architecture, creating the User Interface of the App (see photo below). Project Lead, Laura, set up weekly meetings with Jo, Judith and Dan, working in design sprints, keeping a feedback loop in place, signing off the designs at each sprint. 

‘Laura’s project management was great and was really valuable’ Jo said.

The mobile app was developed using solely Google-based technologies. This made it quicker to create the app because the technologies talk to each other very easily. Dart is the coding language, Flutter is the framework and Firebase is the database.

HealthPad quality assurance at its finest

The HealthPad app was first developed locally, meaning that it wasn’t hosted anywhere but run via a programme on a computer. The app development was then split into development sprints, where at each stage they would be reviewed by another full stack developer. 

When the HealthPad app was built, the app was pushed up to Firebase integrating its database and activating Firebase App Distribution, a platform that allowed a real-time view of what your app will look like on both the Apple Store and Play Store. 

The app was tested in closed beta on a range of devices from big to small and old to new, identifying and addressing any bugs ready for launch.

Final copy tweaks

Jo and her team pulled together the final tweaks of the copy for the HealthPad mobile app, and there you have it. The final masterpiece. An app ready to transform the world’s awareness of their bodies, combating bad posture putting optimum health above all.

Jo, Judith and Dan chose to officially launch the app on National Stress Awareness Day – 23rd November 2021. 

Launch day!

The app went live with overwhelmingly good feedback.

With HealthPad launched as a minimum viable product, Jo, Judith and Dan have their sights set on their next objective:

To build out further features of the app and increase their reach, with a strong focus to create relationships with corporate enterprises, to help their employees be healthier and happier.