Scaling Healthy Change
Designing for lasting health behaviours for citizens, and Human-Centred Design practices in organisations.
Role
Lead Researcher, Designer
Client
Health Promotion Board (Healthcare)
Platform
Mobile, Campaigns
Challenge
Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB) wanted to embed Human-Centred Design (HCD) into how it creates and delivers national health initiatives. While the Customer Experience team was eager to adopt this shift, other internal teams had limited hands-on experience and were cautious about changing their established ways of working.
Over 24 months, I partnered with HPB across five distinct programme teams to help them deepen public engagement and integrate HCD into their own processes:
iQuit → Aiding smokers and vapers in their journey of nicotine cessation.
Youth Weight Management → Helping teens manage obesity amidst academic pressures
Parent Club → Enabling families to build and sustain healthier routines
Integrated Programme → Connecting digital tools within the Healthy365 app to encourage healthier daily habits and practices
Mental Health → Empowering youth to build better coping and management of their mental health
My Role
I partnered closely with the Chief Experience Officer to lead end-to-end research—from planning and recruitment to execution, synthesis, and reporting—across all four engagements.
I also trained and coached HPB teams in applying HCD methods, enabling them to conduct and interpret research independently.
By creating wireframes and engaging in rapid prototyping, I ensured that user insights directly shaped interactions, feature concepts and programme strategies.
User Interviews
Co-Creation Workshop
What We Discovered
We initially hypothesised that making programmes accessible from platforms being used by target audiences would increase consistent engagement based on intrinsic motivation as programmes would meet users where they frequented. But interviews, focus groups, surveys, and diary studies showed me that:
1. Emotions drive health decisions more than logic
HPB’s programmes often relied on rational messaging—facts, data, and clinical advice.
But users told us that emotional context—encouragement, reassurance, and empathy—was what motivated or prevented behaviour change.
2. Internal teams designed from their own experience—not users’ reality
Many teams built initiatives based on their personal assumptions of what Singaporeans needed, often reinforced by leading survey questions. Through our research, we uncovered vast differences in lifestyles, constraints, and motivations influenced by environment and upbringing.
Wireframes
Measurement Framework
Designing for Empathy and Lived Realities
I determined that we needed to change both our approach as well as the mindset that HPB adopted when creating programmes, from pushing new and heavy activities to fitting into their lives, as well as thinking based on user data instead of personal experiences. This led us to citizen-centric designs:
1. We guided programme teams to reframe messaging and design tone to sound encouraging, contextualised to users, and human.
→ Users felt supported, not judged—resulting in stronger emotional connection and reduced resistance to habit formation and behavioural change.
2. We introduced new frameworks and facilitation models to help teams design from evidence rather than assumption.
→ Teams began applying these methods in their own initiatives, marking a tangible mindset shift toward user-centred decision-making.
Results and Impact
Programme Outcomes:
iQuit → Reframed strategy from warnings about nicotine to providing timely reassurance and flexible support, as and when they choose to quit.
Youth Weight Management → Designed engagement around identity and agency, not compliance.
Parent Club → Shifted programme strategy from parent-led to child-led, fostering family-driven, sustainable routines.
Integrated Programme → Unified fragmented programmes and tools within the Healthy365 app, supporting continuous, self-driven health engagement.
Mental Health → Shaped mental health as being part of daily life, instead of an elective area to be deprioritised over others.
Organisational Outcomes:
Delivered user-validated service concepts and prioritised roadmaps across all four programmes.
Upskilled more than 60 HPB staff in research planning, synthesis, ideation, and real-life application.
Built the foundation for HPB’s internal HCD playbook, tailored to its public health ecosystem Strengthened collaboration between policy, digital, and programme teams, reducing misalignment and rework.
"It has become a very important part of the programme itself, it has made us look deeper into the design to help our users."
Khan Tze | HPB Deputy Director
Reflections
In environments where human-centred design isn’t yet embedded, research must also educate, empower, and inspire.
At HPB, I learned that research isn’t just about uncovering user needs—it’s also about helping teams see how insight can be a catalyst, not a blocker. Showing the impact of evidence-based design helped shift mindsets that had been stuck in policy-first thinking to human-centric.
