ACM Interactions

Authors:
A. Miller

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Understanding and applying a multidimensional wellness approach is vital to human health. This approach considers the whole person and views wellness as a pursuit of continued growth and balance that can help enhance the quality of life. Though there are differences of opinion on the number of wellness dimensions, six common measurements include:

  Insights

→ Better health by design can become a reality when inclusive design is intentionally applied to the problem and iterated on.
→ Wellness UX is one way to promote optimal living that can help reduce barriers to accessing information, care, and services.

• Physical wellness, such as physical activity, sleep, nutrition, health promotion, and disease prevention
• Emotional wellness, such as self-care, stress levels, and emotional intelligence
• Social wellness, such as friendship, volunteering, and health communication
• Financial wellness, including budgeting and planning
• Intellectual wellness, including education and learning
• Spiritual wellness, including meaning, purpose, values, and morals.

These dimensions are helpful points of discussion and design in health promotion, lifestyle behavior coaching, and patient care. They offer perspective on matters that affect the health and wellness of a population, such as health equity, digital health, and models of care. Wellness user experience (UX) is a way to promote optimal living with an inclusive design approach. Applying this approach to health and wellness problems can help reduce barriers to accessing information, care, and services, as well as improve quality of life.

What does this look like in practice? This article shares how UX design was applied to a problem and a wellness UX resource that was created as a solution.

  Wellness Guide

Many students have limited time and money, and they experience increased levels of stress while in college. Taking classes and learning can increase intellectual wellness, but it often comes at the cost of something else, such as social, physical, emotional, or financial wellness. Even if students find a solution to the challenges they typically experience—for example, food or housing insecurity, time management, job or income stability, isolation, weight gain—the solutions may cost them time or money (e.g., gym memberships, subscriptions).

We utilized UX and inclusive design to research this problem and this specific population in order to design a wellness resource. It had to be free and available to college students to use as part of their health and wellness tool kit.

UX is an iterative process [1] of collecting information about the behaviors, needs, and motivations of users for a particular product, service, or space. A subset of UX, inclusive design [2] is a process that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity, including ability, language, culture, gender, and age. Together, these design perspectives can empower health and wellness promotion.

  Inclusive Design Checklist

The Digital Scholarship Initiatives (DSI) Lab at Middle Tennessee State University used an inclusive design curriculum to guide graduate students' design thinking and UX methodologies to instruct design research. An inclusive checklist was used to steer the direction of the research and design process. This checklist is applicable across disciplines and industries, including but not limited to computing, the humanities, and social and health sciences. First published in a book chapter on inclusive design [3], the checklist's seven points are summarized here:

• You are not the user. It is best to identify users with varying experiences, identity characteristics, and abilities and then design for, and test with, the intended and potential users, rather than design based on your own interests or preferences.
• Avoid bias. Recognize conscious and subconscious bias, avoid assumptions, and design based on information gathered from a diverse group of users.
• Be mindful of text, images, and color. A simple, uncluttered interface with strategic use of color, typeface selection, appropriate images, labels, and alternative text is vital for readability and accessibility.
• Prioritize content. Content should be navigable and easy to find, with a layout that is scannable and places important content in the top-level hierarchies.
• Be consistent. Develop a style guide for fonts, typeface sizes, colors, icons, and structures to keep content consistently formatted.
• Offer choice. Design for the expert and causal user by giving users the ability to control product settings (e.g., filter, search, zoom, going back or undoing an action, and toggling a feature on-off).
• Document. Provide text, feedback, or clues on how to use the product, such as tutorials, instructions, how-tos, and README files.

  The Impact of Better Health by Design

The DSI Lab's faculty-student team applied this UX and inclusive design knowledge to health and wellness dimensions that could affect the target audience:college students. The lab's iterative ideation, prototyping, and testing phases resulted in the creation of the Wellness Guide (Figure 1; https://library.mtsu.edu/wellness), a multidimensional wellness self-help resource for employees, students, and the community at large. Using design thinking, empathy, and accessibility research, we created a resource whose goal is to ensure better health.

Figure 1. Screenshot of the Wellness Guide homepage.

The Wellness Guide offers a curated selection of resources that are accessible online or locally. They are free or accessible via Middle Tennessee State University's subscriptions and include a mix of media and modalities, such as audio, video, images, and text. These resources are for employees, students, and worldwide users who have an interest in learning, balancing, and attaining the quality of life they seek. The Wellness Guide, which applies the seven inclusive design checklist points, has had more than 1,000 page views, inspired multidimensional wellness campaigns on campus, and won the PR Xchange's 2024 award for best digital exhibit.

  The Lesson of Wellness + UX

The intentionality of a design project matters. Without it, projects can fail to meet their objectives. Attaining better health also matters, whether on a global or personal scale. Community health, social wellness, health awareness, and disease prevention have an impact on everyone. Better health by design can become a reality when inclusive design is leading the way. Although we initially looked at how increased stress levels and lack of wellness resources affect college students, the inclusive design approach helped us broaden the application to include other people who may be affected by these challenges. Thus, the Wellness Guide can be used by a larger population by design. Students, parents, siblings, caregivers—the community at large—have access to this curated set of resources.

  References

1. Usability. Digital.gov, https://digital.gov/topics/usability/

2. Wikipedia contributors. Inclusive design. Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive design.

3. Miller, A. Inclusive design: A method and craft of transforming digital humanities with user experience. In Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists. A. Hartsell-Gundy, L.R. Braunstein, and L. Golomb, eds. Association of College and Research Libraries, Chicago, 2024.

  Author

A. Miller is an author, professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and a UX/HCI researcher who uses an interdisciplinary and inclusive design approach to enhance socio-technical systems, information communication technologies, and social accessibility. Miller's research interests are socio-technical in nature, including accessible computing, digital information design, digital preservation, information retrieval, wellness design, and human-centered design. [email protected]

 

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