Preface
At VATION we were helping people to live a healthier life. Striving to find product-market-fit, which we didn't after all, I led the discovery work through fast paced experimentation across our two products: The customer mobile app and the coach interface.
The research and experimentation my team has conducted, devalidated the businesses initial core assumption (that semi-professional athletes would like to hire a digital personal coach) and informed the product strategy throughout the year.
In the end, we needed to accept, that the business model was just not sufficient and scalable at the intended price point. Nevertheless, I was able to learn a lot about human motivation and behaviours. It was also a pleasure to work alongside the founders team, running design thinking workshops, establishing lean research processes and mentoring a junior designer and a junior product manager.
Let's face it: Losing weight and keeping it long-term only works when you change the way you eat and build new health habits
Even if behavior change seems straight forward - just doing the new behavior again and again - sticking to it alone poses an impossible challenge for most of us
Based on what we knew from our customer research, we came up with a set of assumptions:
Essentially those assumptions were the parts that we believed are important for customers to immediately understand the essence of our service. Personal coaching, understanding and reflecting on your own behavioral patterns and getting into action by completing the tasks from your health plan.
This allowed us to turn around the customer apps value proposition within a couple of months. Originally, it has been directed towards semi-professional athletes. Once we understood that the initially intended target group doesn't have a life impacting pain, we found patterns amongst a group of people, that are struggling with different health related issues, due to their overweight. Most of them, have tried different kinds of weight loss programs already and nothing seemed to work.
Their common answer was: "I cannot do it on my own. I need help."
Step by step, we implemented ways to remotely keep our customers accountable to an initially agreed plan. The main approach has been making the experience as personal as possible.
We introduced self-monitoring mechanisms that allowed us to understand our customers behavioral patterns. Those data points informed their individual health plans and enabled our coaches to start meaningful interactions throughout the week.
Customers should experience that every little positive action is of value and brings them closer to more health. This helped building up more consistency and turn unhealthy behaviors into healthy ones.
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks so our interface should provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.
Throughout the experience we are initiating touchpoints to the customers coach. They shared heathy recipes to the health plan, reached out before and after planned activities and checked-in when they could observe lumps in motivation. Our coaches are our customers accountablity partners.
The core of the experience is the customers individual health plan. The plan is the strategy to overcome their original believes by experiencing change. Gradually we help them to swap out identified unhealthy behaviors for healthy ones.
A key need we saw, is to connect every little action to a higher goal and create a continous sense of progress. Together we are forming the customers self-efficacy - their belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals, which is broken when they originally find us.
A core problem of this business model has been coach capacity. When we started, one coach managed around 5 customers. In order to grow the business we knew that this needs to increase. Our business plan demanded for a 1:100 ratio and more, without taking hits on the customer experience aka. keeping it personal to enable accountability.
Identifying the coaches customer jobs was a first step to understand how we might enable them to manage an increasing amount of customers.
To create personalized experiences, its crucial for them to know who their customers are and how they tick. Information about their health, communication, feedback, activity, adherence, internal notes.
Coaches feel overwhelmed with an increasing amount of customers, they need to keep and manage huge amounts of data to build empathic relationships but face data that is spread all over various platforms and media.
One key strategy was to centralize all of this information and make it actionable.
Coach Jobs
Working towards a unified experience, we were seeking for patterns within our 35 coaches coaching styles. We've been heavily testing our assumptions, iterating and gradually implementing value creators.
Survey results to "Which kind of notes do you want to create about your client"
Layout Variation 1 - Scheme
Layout Variation 2 - Scheme
The following graphic shows an exploration that combines the ability to easily navigate through a growing amount of customers, with understanding where to focus on first. It allows for a deep dive into their profiles and makes it easy to create and adjust health plans, while keeping track of their progress.
We also explored possibilities to enhance this view with more tangible data about customers behaviors.
Preface
At VATION we were helping people to live a healthier life. Striving to find product-market-fit, which we didn't after all, I led the discovery work through fast paced experimentation across our two products: The customer mobile app and the coach interface.
The research and experimentation my team has conducted, devalidated the businesses initial core assumption (that semi-professional athletes would like to hire a digital personal coach) and informed the product strategy throughout the year.
In the end, we needed to accept, that the business model was just not sufficient and scalable at the intended price point. Nevertheless, I was able to learn a lot about human motivation and behaviours. It was also a pleasure to work alongside the founders team, running design thinking workshops, establishing lean research processes and mentoring a junior designer and a junior product manager.
Let's face it: Losing weight and keeping it long-term only works when you change the way you eat and build new health habits
Even if behavior change seems straight forward - just doing the new behavior again and again - sticking to it alone poses an impossible challenge for most of us
Based on what we knew from our customer research, we came up with a set of assumptions:
Essentially those assumptions were the parts that we believed are important for customers to immediately understand the essence of our service. Personal coaching, understanding and reflecting on your own behavioral patterns and getting into action by completing the tasks from your health plan.
This allowed us to turn around the customer apps value proposition within a couple of months. Originally, it has been directed towards semi-professional athletes. Once we understood that the initially intended target group doesn't have a life impacting pain, we found patterns amongst a group of people, that are struggling with different health related issues, due to their overweight. Most of them, have tried different kinds of weight loss programs already and nothing seemed to work.
Their common answer was: "I cannot do it on my own. I need help."
Step by step, we implemented ways to remotely keep our customers accountable to an initially agreed plan. The main approach has been making the experience as personal as possible.
We introduced self-monitoring mechanisms that allowed us to understand our customers behavioral patterns. Those data points informed their individual health plans and enabled our coaches to start meaningful interactions throughout the week.
Customers should experience that every little positive action is of value and brings them closer to more health. This helped building up more consistency and turn unhealthy behaviors into healthy ones.
People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks so our interface should provide a clear indication of progress in order to motivate users to complete tasks.
Throughout the experience we are initiating touchpoints to the customers coach. They shared heathy recipes to the health plan, reached out before and after planned activities and checked-in when they could observe lumps in motivation. Our coaches are our customers accountablity partners.
The core of the experience is the customers individual health plan. The plan is the strategy to overcome their original believes by experiencing change. Gradually we help them to swap out identified unhealthy behaviors for healthy ones.
A key need we saw, is to connect every little action to a higher goal and create a continous sense of progress. Together we are forming the customers self-efficacy - their belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals, which is broken when they originally find us.
A core problem of this business model has been coach capacity. When we started, one coach managed around 5 customers. In order to grow the business we knew that this needs to increase. Our business plan demanded for a 1:100 ratio and more, without taking hits on the customer experience aka. keeping it personal to enable accountability.
Identifying the coaches customer jobs was a first step to understand how we might enable them to manage an increasing amount of customers.
To create personalized experiences, its crucial for them to know who their customers are and how they tick. Information about their health, communication, feedback, activity, adherence, internal notes.
Coaches feel overwhelmed with an increasing amount of customers, they need to keep and manage huge amounts of data to build empathic relationships but face data that is spread all over various platforms and media.
One key strategy was to centralize all of this information and make it actionable.
Working towards a unified experience, we were seeking for patterns within our 35 coaches coaching styles. We've been heavily testing our assumptions, iterating and gradually implementing value creators.
Survey results to "Which kind of notes do you want to create about your client"
Layout Variation 1 - Scheme
Layout Variation 2 - Scheme
The following graphic shows an exploration that combines the ability to easily navigate through a growing amount of customers, with understanding where to focus on first. It allows for a deep dive into their profiles and makes it easy to create and adjust health plans, while keeping track of their progress.
We also explored possibilities to enhance this view with more tangible data about customers behaviors.