A Service Design for Enhancing Weight Loss Program Using Design Thinking Method

Abstract

How to lose weight in a healthy way is still an important health issue in the whole world There was already a large amount of literatures discussing about obesity therapy from nutrition and exercise perspectives Although general public’s health consciousness has increased because of the advance of information and communication technology and some of them had tried some ways to lose weight there is still a high proportion of weight rebound This research used “design thinking” process as an innovative method which values user experience to examine both existing supporter for service related to weight loss in Taiwan and people who ever have weight loss experience Beginning with empathizing users’ experience we framed the critical problems into two stages: how to overcome plateau effect and if the behavior users want to change can further develop to form a habit to avoid weight rebound Trough literature review and user experience analyses we found “recording” is a tool usually used in Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Performance management It has the function to help users to use objective point of view to avoid themselves from negative emotions caused by cognitive distortion and to realize their behavior modes The research then combined current existing tools and human-based consideration To apply the concept of “lifelog” which is to record down what had happened in our life to make service design prototype Through recording behavior which had already happened on supplementary tools users could objectively view the behavior which occurs repeatedly according to their habit And then find out the fixing point to help alter the habit Six participants were invited to investigate its adaptation to current existing weight loss services and the result showed that participants who used paper notebook to record Lifelog show better result in stimulate intrinsic motivation creativity and introspection But it’s inconvenient to use was the obstruction for participants to keep using it; For participants who used digital media such as Line or Facebook they feel it’s more convenient to use and had the advantage of rapidly receive reply and encouragement from virtual community But it shows less effect in changing original behavior The reason may be digital media is easy to let users simplify things and hard to in-depth deal with them Internet also might let users easy overloaded with too much information and disturbed by opinions of others People suffer from too many distractions in this Information Age How to increase people’s consciousness of their own behavior and more focus on feeling the happiness brought by their health improvement and self-development As the habit have been successfully changed could avoid weight rebound

Date of Award	2017 Feb 14
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shyh-Nan Liou (Supervisor)