The Challenge

The product team at Arivale was given extensive time to do user research and create blue sky concepts exploring possible market strategy, branding, visual design, and functionality of a freemium mobile offering.

At this stage, we were still uncertain how to describe Arivale to people, and whether we should pare down our offering for an app. Should we focus on:

• The blood and genetics data?

• The coaching relationship?

• The habit tracking?

• A synthesis of the 3?
  This was the real magic of Arivale, but challenging to explain.

finding focus

The design team was wary of focusing on habit tracking because only 20% of our users actually used the features we had, and most for only a few weeks.

My proposal to the team was that if our main goal is to help our members improve their health, that to do so will ALWAYS involve habit creation. The work our coaches did every day validated this core truth.

But our tracking feature was lacking. Checking off habits daily is a pain. Our interface wasn’t very exciting, and it didn’t reward people. We didn’t even have mobile notifications to remind people to check their actions off.

I argued that if we IMPROVED the habit tracking feature, made it easier, made it more friendly, made it more fun and rewarding, and made the entire interaction feel more like interacting with a human coach, that it may end up being our secret sauce.

The proposal

In both of the concepts on this page, I sought to validate a simplified version of our app that focused on habit creation and progress tracking. My suggestions included:

• Giving customized suggestions for actions based on an initial assessment

• Focusing on tracking actions and tracking progress

• Giving the member control over what actions to focus on and in what order

• Giving the member a sense of their longer-term journey

• Gamifying and humanizing the experience

The Conclusion

Each of our designers came up with two concepts and conducted a set of user tests to get a sense for whether people understood the offering and whether they wanted the offering or not.

It continued to be a challenge to summarize the service, and to make it obvious that we aren’t simply a habit tracker / calorie counter / exercise app. In the end, we struggled to find a market fit for Arivale in the data, coaching or habit tracking worlds.

However, these landing pages planted the seeds of powerful ideas we worked on later in the year.