Daily Progress Tracker
Overview
I joined Mighty Health as their first product designer and led a complete redesign amidst a complete payer model transition from payer to direct consumer. Insights found from user research led to a daily progress tracker feature that resulted in a 60% retention rate on the first few days.
About
Mighty Health is one of the leading health and wellness apps for older adults. They pair you with a personal health coach to keep you accountable towards your goals.
Team
Eng Team
CTO - Felipe Lopez
Engineer - Fernando Ruaro
Product Team
Product Designer - Me
CEO - James Li
Status
shipped! 🚀 (1.5mo)
Problem
Mighty Health was undergoing a complete business model transition, switching from B2B to direct-to-consumer, and their current design was still in its early demo stages to test proof of concept.
I joined as their first product designer and as my first project, we needed to figure out who our new user base would be, what branding style to embody, and improve UI for long-term retention.
Process
The design process was split into two parts, dividing the first half for research before diving into the second half to design the feature.
User research
Making the transition from payer to consumer meant the demographic was going to shift away from cardiac rehab-specific patients. Entering uncharted territories meant creating a research strategy for their new demographic and creating a user persona on which they would base future design decisions.
I conducted customer calls to get a better understanding of our new users and synthesized findings into an affinity map to start building the persona.
One of our biggest findings was learning about the types of apps our older adult demographic typically downloaded. Not only were they all familiar with Facebook, but they were also actively downloading in-app games such as Sudoku, Wordscape, and Mahjong. This was a great insight to include gamification techniques and common UI patterns found in these apps.
Comparative Analysis
What makes an app sticky? After discovering that in-app games were very popular among a 50-60 age group, I dove a little deeper into comparative research to see what apps successfully turned their experience into something fun and delightful.
Duolingo and Peloton were two apps that figured out the secret sauce to strong retention. The way they incorporate small delightful moments made the user feel special and accomplished.
Duolingo, along with many other progress-based apps, incorporate streaks and visually show progress throughout their journey. Peloton adds a personal touch by giving shout-outs to riders that join live, announcing their achievements and raising them up. These apps figured out how to make a lasting impression from the very first day to keep users coming back for more.
Information Architecture
While mapping out our current flow, I discovered areas that could be improved based on these findings. We were lacking these moments of delight, a way to celebrate small milestones, and no excitement built in with their progress. There was nothing waiting for the user once they entered the app at this stage other than their tasks to complete.
The proposed flow guides them, tracks their progress after each task, and awards an achievement as soon as they complete all tasks for their first day.
Solution
Our explorations solidified our need for a daily progress tracker that not only was unique to our brand, but also incorporated a sense of delight upon accomplishment. This was coupled with intuitive ways to navigate their tasks, touchpoints with a personal health coach for accountability, streaks/achievements, and even delightful confetti after accomplishing all the tasks.
We hypothesized that we’d achieve high retention through gamifying their first-day experience and adding in little delightful experiences when completing their first day’s tasks.
Initial designs revolved around figuring out the best approach for the progress tracker. After exploring a bunch of different applications with the team, it was apparent that the tracker needed to be a statement piece that represented our brand and could be identified from a mile away.
The wireframing (lo-fi to hi-fi) process was unique because we were discovering what branding style to incorporate at the same time. This included figuring out type hierarchy, color scheme, brand voice, and more.
Every element of the design needed to be thought out thoroughly, piece-by-piece with the whole team collaborating together.
Results
The progress tracker ended up being a huge success and the gamification techniques helped retain the first few days of retention at 60% even two years after launch. The progress circle’s confetti canon is still one of our most beloved features based on quarterly feedback interviews conducted with members and the streaks incorporated instill a competitive side in them.
What I learned
You don’t truly know your users until you’ve talked to them! Going into this project, I assumed the technical constraints of our app would be too great for our target demographic and we would require more traditional methods of onboarding outside the app. Doing usability tests early and often were great ways to see how they interacted with our UI and allowed us to explore more complex patterns than we initially thought.