Arexpal UX Case Study
Designing a Lifeline for Preventive Health. A UX journey into behavior change.
This case study documents the end-to-end design process for Arexpal, a mobile application designed to make cancer prevention accessible, engaging, and life-changing. We'll explore how we moved from a broad societal challenge to a refined, user-centric solution, all guided by the principles of the Double Diamond design framework.
Our goal was not merely to build an app, but to design a companion—a tool that uses the addictive mechanics of modern technology for a profoundly positive purpose.
Part 1: Discover & Define – Understanding the Problem
The first half of the Double Diamond process is about divergence and convergence. We start by exploring the problem as widely as possible (Discover) and then synthesize those findings into a clear, actionable problem statement (Define). This phase is about falling in love with the problem, not the solution.
The Challenge: Health Education Is A Privilege, Not A Right
Our project began with a stark and sobering reality: cancer is not a single disease, and prevention is our most powerful weapon against it. Up to 40% of cancers can be prevented through lifestyle modifications in areas like diet, exercise, stress management, and substance use. The knowledge to make these changes exists, but it's locked away, unevenly distributed, and often fails to inspire action.
The core challenge was twofold:
The Access Gap
How can we deliver life-saving preventive health knowledge to everyone, regardless of their proximity to clinics, the quality of their formal education, or their socioeconomic status? Building more hospitals is a slow, expensive solution. Traditional health campaigns have limited reach and sustainability.
The Action Gap
Even when people have access to information, why does it so rarely translate into lasting behavior change? We all know that smoking is harmful and a balanced diet is good, yet the gap between knowledge and action persists.
We saw a single, ubiquitous tool that could bridge both gaps: the smartphone. Our challenge, therefore, crystallized into a focused question: How might we leverage the smartphone to transform preventive health education from a passive, forgettable chore into an active, addictive, and deeply personal daily habit?
Pain Points: The Four Barriers to a Healthier Life
To truly understand the "why" behind the access and action gaps, our team initiated the Discover phase. We conducted a mixed-methods research campaign, including 20 in-depth user interviews across our target demographics, a market analysis of over 30 existing health and wellness apps, and a survey of 250 individuals. This divergent exploration allowed us to immerse ourselves in the user's world, and from this, we synthesized our findings into four critical pain points during the Define phase.
1. Barrier to Access & Trust
"I want to be healthier, but my local clinic is two hours away, and I can't afford to take the day off work. I look online, but one site says coffee is a superfood, and the next says it causes cancer. Who do I even trust?"
The Pain: Reliable health information is physically and financially inaccessible for many. The digital alternative is a chaotic wasteland of contradictory, jargon-filled, and often untrustworthy content. Users feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the noise.
2. Information Overwhelm & Cognitive Load
"I downloaded a health app once. It gave me a 20-page article on antioxidants. I have two kids and a full-time job. I read the first paragraph and never opened it again."
The Pain: The human brain is not wired to process dense, clinical information, especially when already stressed. Health education is often presented in a way that is academically sound but behaviorally ineffective. It demands too much cognitive effort for too little immediate reward.
3. The Behavioral Gap & Lack of Motivation
"I know I should stop smoking. I've tried. But after a stressful day, it's just... easy. The 'reward' of quitting feels so far away, but the reward of a cigarette is instant."
The Pain: Humans are driven by short-term feedback loops. The long-term benefits of preventive health are abstract and delayed, while unhealthy habits often provide immediate gratification. Without compelling, immediate reinforcement, good intentions fizzle out.
4. The Retention Challenge & "Chore" Factor
"Most health apps feel like a doctor nagging me. They're sterile, boring, and make me feel guilty when I miss a day. It feels like work, not something I want to do."
The Pain: Existing health apps frequently fail because they are designed like medical tools, not human experiences. They lack emotional connection, rewarding feedback, and a sense of play, leading to high churn rates as users quickly lose interest.
These four pain points became the foundation of our design strategy. We weren't just building an information delivery system; we were designing a solution to overcome deep-seated psychological and accessibility barriers.
Design Process: The Double Diamond in Action
To tackle this multifaceted challenge, we committed to the Double Diamond framework. This approach ensured we didn't jump to solutions prematurely and that our final product was rigorously validated against real user needs.
Discover
Broad research—user interviews, competitor analysis, and literature reviews on behavioral psychology
Define
Synthesized research into four core pain points and developed three detailed user personas
Develop
Creative exploration with brainstorming sessions, wireframes, user flows, and information architecture
Deliver
Refined ideas into high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototype, and usability testing
Part 2: Develop & Deliver – Crafting the Solution
With a clearly defined problem and a deep understanding of our users, we entered the second half of the Double Diamond. This is where we explored potential solutions (Develop) and refined them into a final, polished product (Deliver).
Personas: Giving Our Users a Face and a Voice
From our research in the Define phase, we developed three core personas. These weren't just demographic checklists; they were narrative tools that guided every design decision, from the tone of voice to the feature prioritization. They kept us grounded in human-centered design.
Zainab, The Youth
18 years old, University Student
Bio
Zainab is a bright, social university student living in a bustling city. Her life revolves around her studies, friends, and social media. She's experimenting with her independence, which includes late-night fast food, social drinking, and occasional smoking. The concept of long-term health feels abstract and distant.
Goals
- • Fit in with her social circle
- • Manage the stress of her studies
- • Discover fun, new experiences
Frustrations
- • Health advice feels preachy and irrelevant
- • Traditional health apps are boring
- • Limited disposable income for health
UX Goal for Zainab
Make health education feel like a fun, social game. It needs to be shareable, competitive, and use language that resonates with her generation.
David, The Health-Conscious Adult
35 years old, Software Developer
Bio
David works a demanding, sedentary job. He's married with one child and is starting to notice the effects of a high-stress lifestyle. He tries to eat well and exercises sporadically but struggles with consistency. He is a proactive information-seeker but feels overwhelmed by conflicting advice online.
Goals
- • Have more energy for his family
- • Manage work-related stress effectively
- • Find a sustainable, practical routine
Frustrations
- • Lack of time for complex health articles
- • "All-or-nothing" fitness plans
- • Difficulty tracking daily habits
UX Goal for David
Provide actionable, personalized, and data-driven insights that fit seamlessly into his busy life. The experience must feel efficient, credible, and empowering.
Aisha, The Survivor
52 years old, Retired Teacher, Post-Treatment
Bio
Aisha is a breast cancer survivor. Her treatment was successful, but she lives with the constant fear of recurrence. Her doctor has advised her to manage her diet, stress, and sleep, but she feels anxious and unsupported in her daily journey.
Goals
- • Feel in control of her health
- • Find supportive community
- • Build healthy habits to minimize risk
Frustrations
- • Clinical, impersonal tracking tools
- • The emotional toll of health management
- • Feeling alone in her journey
UX Goal for Aisha
Create a gentle, empathetic, and structured experience. The focus is on reassurance, emotional well-being, and celebrating consistent progress over time.
Information Architecture (IA): Building a Clear and Scalable Foundation
During the Develop phase, a key step was designing the app's structure. Our IA was guided by the principle of Cognitive Ease. We wanted users to navigate the app intuitively, without ever feeling lost or having to think too hard about where to find something. The structure is flat and centered around four key user activities.
Sitemap
1.0 Home (The Dashboard)
The user's daily starting point. Provides a quick, personalized overview of their day.
2.0 Feed (The Library)
The knowledge hub. Where users discover and consume educational content.
• 2.1 For You (AI-Personalized)
• 2.2 General (Public Health Awareness)
• 2.3 Saved (Personal Collection)
3.0 Diary (The Log)
The central interaction point. The tool for self-reflection and data input.
• 3.1 New Daily Entry
• 3.2 View Past Entries & Patterns
4.0 Challenges (The Gym)
The action and engagement hub. Where knowledge turns into practice through gamified tasks.
• 4.1 My Active Challenges
• 4.2 Explore New Challenges
5.0 Profile (The Trophy Room)
The user's identity and progress center.
• 5.1 My Badges & Streaks
• 5.2 Data & Progress Visualization
• 5.3 Settings & Notifications
The bottom navigation bar prominently features Home, Feed, Challenges, and Profile, with the most important action, Diary, placed in the center as a visually distinct Floating Action Button (FAB). This hierarchy constantly reinforces the core loop: learn (Feed), act (Challenges), and reflect (Diary).
User Flows: Charting the Path to Engagement
To ensure a frictionless experience, we mapped out critical user flows. These flows demonstrate how users navigate through the core features of Arexpal, from daily logging to challenge participation.
Daily Diary Logging Flow
Goal: Make habit logging effortless and rewarding
User opens app → Diary icon at center bottom nav
Sees today's date and input box
Smart prompts carousel suggests logs (e.g., "Did you eat fruits today?" "Sleep hours?")
User types or taps quick options
Entry saved → earns Vital Points + micro-reward animation
User sees log appear in today's summary
Tips & Feed Flow
Goal: Educate through snackable content while keeping it fun
User taps Feed tab
Default view = "For You" (personalized AI tips)
User scrolls → each card shows a health tip or fun fact
User can like, share, save, or bookmark
User switches to General Tips or Bookmarked Tips via toggle
User exits → receives gentle nudge notification later ("Want your next cancer-fighting tip?")
Challenge Participation Flow
Goal: Motivate users with community-driven challenges
User taps Challenges tab
Browses "Suggested Challenges" or uses search
Selects a challenge card (e.g., "7-Day No Sugar Challenge")
Reads details: focus, duration, reward, participants
Taps Join Challenge → confirmation screen
Challenge now appears in Active Challenges with progress bar
User earns Vital Points and badges as milestones are reached
The Solution: Health Education That Feels Human
Our solution, Arexpal, is a mobile app grounded in three core design principles that directly address the user pain points:
Cognitive Ease
Information is delivered in bite-sized, jargon-free snippets ("Tip Cards"). Navigation is simple and predictable. The UI is clean and uncluttered, reducing cognitive load and making engagement effortless.
Emotional Design
We moved away from a sterile, clinical aesthetic. Arexpal uses a warm color palette, playful icons, and an encouraging, conversational tone of voice. Micro-interactions like celebratory animations and haptic feedback make users feel seen, supported, and successful.
Behavioral Stickiness
We ethically borrowed powerful mechanics from social media and gaming to drive retention and motivation. This includes gamification (points, badges, streaks), social accountability (challenges), and psychological principles like the Zeigarnik Effect.
The AI Engine: Personalization at Scale
At its heart, the solution is powered by a sophisticated but invisible AI engine that personalizes the entire experience, from the tips in the feed to the prompts in the diary, ensuring the content is always relevant, timely, and culturally resonant.
Final Designs: A Walkthrough of the Core Experience
This is the Deliver stage, where our concepts, flows, and principles manifest as tangible screens.
1. The Home Page: Your Daily Dose of Encouragement
The Home page is the user's dashboard. It's designed to be scanned in seconds while providing value and a gentle nudge toward engagement.
Personalized Welcome
A simple "Good morning, David!" immediately establishes an emotional connection.
Quick Daily Log
A prominent, one-tap entry point to the Diary, reducing the friction of logging.
Today's Tip (AI-Powered)
The hero component. This isn't a random fact; it's a micro-learning card generated by our AI, tailored to the user's persona and recent logs.
Gamification At-a-Glance
Progress bars for active challenges, current streak counts, and recently earned badges are visible, providing instant positive reinforcement.
UX Rationale
The Home page fights information overwhelm and the "chore" factor. It's not a list of tasks but a calm, encouraging space that respects the user's time and motivates them for the day ahead.
2. The Diary Page: A Conversation, Not a Clinical Record
We deliberately reframed journaling. The central navigation icon is the Arexpal logo, reinforcing this as the app's core interaction.
Conversational Input
Instead of empty text fields, the page opens with a friendly prompt like, "What's on your mind today, Aisha?"
Smart Prompts Carousel
The key innovation. The AI suggests relevant things to log based on the user's goals and past entries. This turns logging from a recall exercise into a simple choice-based interaction.
Locked Badge Teasers
To motivate consistent logging, a locked badge might be shown with the text "Log for 7 days in a row to unlock." This creates curiosity and a clear goal.
UX Rationale
This design systematically dismantles the intimidation of journaling. By making it guided, conversational, and rewarding, we lower the barrier to self-reflection, which is critical for behavior change.
3. The Feed Page: Your Personalized Health Magazine
The Feed makes learning feel as effortless and engaging as scrolling through social media.
Intuitive Sorting
Users can easily toggle between a "For You" feed (personalized by AI), a "General" feed (for broad public health topics), and their "Saved" tips.
The Tip Card Component
Each piece of content is a compact, visually appealing card. It contains a headline, a short summary, an optional image, and the source (e.g., "Source: W.H.O."). Quick actions for "Like," "Save," and "Share" are always visible.
UX Rationale
This directly tackles the pain point of information overload and distrust. It replaces a chaotic Google search with a curated, credible, and highly personalized stream of knowledge, consumed in a familiar and enjoyable format.
4. The Challenges Page: Where Knowledge Becomes Action
This is the gamification engine of the app.
Clear Progress Visualization
Active challenges are displayed at the top with prominent progress bars, providing immediate visual feedback.
Social Proof
Challenge cards show how many other users are participating, leveraging social accountability as a powerful motivator.
Action-Oriented Design
Each card is a clear call to action (CTA), containing all the necessary information to make a decision: title, focus area, duration, and reward.
UX Rationale
The Challenges page directly addresses the behavioral gap. It translates abstract health goals (e.g., "manage stress") into concrete, short-term, and rewarding missions (e.g., "Complete the 5-Day Meditation Challenge").
Other Pages
The Prototype: Bringing the Experience to Life
To validate our designs, we built a high-fidelity, interactive prototype in Figma. This prototype demonstrates the core user journeys and showcases the app's functionality in action.
Usability Testing Results
We used this prototype to conduct five moderated usability testing sessions with users representing each of our personas. The goal was to test for clarity, ease of use, and emotional response. The feedback was invaluable, leading to several key iterations, such as simplifying the language on the challenge cards and adding more celebratory feedback after a user completed a task.
Task Completion Rate
Average Usability Score
User Satisfaction
The Outcome: Measuring What Matters
The success of Arexpal cannot be measured by downloads alone. Our UX success metrics are directly tied to our initial goals of bridging the access and action gaps. We measure success through a combination of quantitative and qualitative data:
Engagement & Retention Metrics
Daily Active Users (DAU)
Are people building a daily habit?
Streak Retention
What percentage of users maintain a streak for more than 7, 14, and 30 days? This is a direct measure of behavioral stickiness.
Core Action Rate
The percentage of DAU who perform a core action (log, complete a challenge, or save a tip).
Education & Behavior Change
In-App Knowledge Quizzes
Optional quizzes to measure self-reported improvements in health literacy.
Qualitative Logging Data
Analysis of anonymized log data to identify trends, such as users reporting increased sleep hours or decreased instances of smoking.
Emotional Feedback
In-App Surveys
Periodically asking users to rate their motivation levels and the app's ease of use on a 1-5 scale.
User Reviews & Feedback
Monitoring qualitative feedback for words like "easy," "fun," "motivating," or "reassuring."
Target Results
Hypothetical results after a 6-month launch would aim for a 30-day streak retention rate of over 15% (well above industry average for health apps) and a statistically significant self-reported reduction in at least one negative health behavior among active users.
Reflection: Learning, Iterating, and Looking Ahead
Designing Arexpal was a profound lesson in the responsibility of UX. We were not just arranging pixels; we were building a system designed to influence deeply personal human behaviors.
What Went Well
Persona-Driven Design
Keeping Zainab, David, and Aisha at the forefront of every conversation ensured we built a human-centric product, not just a feature-rich one.
Ethical Gamification
We successfully walked the fine line between "engaging" and "addictive." By tying rewards directly to positive health actions and giving users control over notifications, we used behavioral mechanics as a force for good.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Close collaboration between designers, developers, and public health consultants was critical. The human-vetting loop for our AI content is a testament to this, ensuring our product is both smart and safe.
Challenges & Future Improvements
Balancing Simplicity and Power
A constant challenge was keeping the interface simple while housing a powerful AI and data-tracking backend. In the future, we could explore more advanced data visualizations for power users like David without cluttering the experience for Zainab.
Scaling Cultural Nuance
While we started with Nigerian languages and cultural examples, truly globalizing the app will require a robust localization framework that goes beyond simple translation to adapt content, imagery, and even color symbolism for different cultures.
Next Steps
Future iterations could include integration with wearable technology (e.g., Apple Health, Google Fit) for automated data logging, and building out more robust community features where users like Aisha can find peer-to-peer support in a safe, moderated environment.
Final Thoughts
Cancer prevention starts with behavior change. Behavior change starts with a compelling experience. And a compelling experience is the ultimate goal of UX design. Arexpal is more than an app; it is a hypothesis that thoughtful, empathetic, and behaviorally-aware design can be a lifeline, empowering millions to take control of their health one tap at a time. It is a testament to the idea that the most impactful UX is not just designed for use, but designed for life.