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My Role

Co-Owner - Creative Direction - Product Design - User Research (Ethnography, User Testing) - Prototyping (Paper, Sketch, Bubble.io, Code) - UX/UI Design - Visual & Brand Design - iOS App Development

Context

An ex product manager colleague approached about me about collaborating on a wellness x productivity app project to help people identify & sustain meaningful change in their lives, which evolved into a shared endeavour.

The app had gone through an initial design & development iteration prior to my coming onboard, but early testing had clearly informed that the magnitude of onboarding & daily flow complexity were a barrier to user adoption.

Once we had aligned on a shared product vision, my approach was first to perform a deep design critique of the product, and re-synthesise all prior product research & design decisions, to better understand how the product landed where it did. This process also involved desktop research into the productivity & wellness trends & competitive analysis.

I adopted a lean product design process of iterative prototyping, starting with paper sketches, evolving into digital mockups, interactive prototypes & eventually functional software & using 1:1 user testing at every step of the way to shape product design confidence. This process drove a radical, ground-up product re-imagining & helped identify a broader target audience.

Key Challenges

Core flow complexity
Original design prior to my coming onboard required the user to linearly navigate through 36 discrete screens & enter information into 50 UI elements - just to set up the app.

To address this, I mapped out the complex screen flows, and using the product north start mission that I workshopped with my co-founder, I identiifed subflows & actions that could be removed, re-factored or postponed. I then used storytelling techniques to design a fresh user-centric onboarding flow, which was further interated upon in my lean product design process.

Making hard work easy
User research informed us that the key design challenge would be how to offset the emotional & cognitive heaviness that regularly short-circuits implementing systemic, positive change in people’s lives.

To address this, I developed a bespoke motivational strategy using behaviour change design principles & procrastination theory, to help users create & sustain positive, goal-aligned habits.