illume Apps
Over 3 years, we built a collection of award-winning mental health and self-development apps, from anxiety and depression to grief and business wisdom. Grief Works with Julia Samuel was one of our most popular apps, and became Apple's App of the Day.
Completion Date
2018-2021
Category
Product Management and Design for a collection of award winning self-developement and mental health apps.
Sector
Health & Wellness, Grief
Overview
A collection of courses, MVP's and iterations
The Anxiety Solution, The Compassion Mind +more
We designed and built the first mvp’s. The Anxiety Solution, by Chloe Brotheridge was the first followed by The Compassionate Mind (Chris Irons and Elaine Beaumont), When (Dan Pink), Lost Connections and others. Each posed a different set of features, challenges and learnings. Although the initial framework of the product had primarily been designed by an external designer in Photoshop (back in the days before Figma), it was a skeleton of a course and was our job to work with the authors to refine the courses for each app.
We did this by working as a tight unit of copyrighters, developers and designers ensuring what we were designing was as impactful, actionable, and as efficient as possible.
The Challenge
At this stage very little user research had been done when really it should have been - a big learning I took from this project! Even though we were designing what we thought were highly effective sessions and practices, when the first MVP, The Anxiety Solution was launched, we hadn’t validated how effective they were to the extent we should have done. This led to some interesting findings, some inevitable changes and on reflection and fairly unorthodox design process.
A live but semi-validated, mostly untested MVP - not your usual design process!
How did we test the MVP's
After many hours of back and forth with Chloe, copy iterations, design edits, late nights and (missed) sprint deadlines, the Anxiety Solution was finally live and ready for users. However, although we were very happy with it internally, externally the we really didn’t know what the consensus was. We should have tested little and often as we were building but because of time and investor pressure, the leadership team were keen for us to keep building as much as possible week after week.
We got away with it, just!
illume’s business model was powerful for one reason amongst many, that behind each author was a large existing user base who had already validated the course content and were eager for more practices. This gave us good grounds to assume the content we had written and built was of real value. Thankfully, for the most part we were correct but there were changes to be made of course.
A series of user interviews, Gorilla tests in coffee shops and even a Whatsapp group led to some validated changes.
Designing a more personalised home screen
I ran a series of qualitative interviews with users to determine how important a home screen was and what users needed within a home screen. A clear insight was that users needed to see their course progress to keep motivation high, the next lesson for instant accessibility and quick tools to hand-hold them with clear direction to help them in the moment.
Refining the course design
Our courses consisted of 28 sessions, each with a ‘wisdom’ and a ‘practice’. They were designed to be between 5-15 minutes each day filled with wisdom and daily practices from the author. A large part of my role was to design and manage the development of these courses within a sprint framework. The copy would go through numerous edits from the copywriting team and the author but it was my job to design it as best as possible, with visuals for the app. This required constant engagement and testing with users, a process I consistently relied on to generate the best results.
Emphasising connection to the author
From user interviews, it was clear that users did not feel connected enough to the author and when dealing with topics such as grief and depression, this was a really important issue.
We therefore introduced video content through the app, including in the onboarding, tools and throughout the course. Users really loved this not only did engagement improve but the value of the product did as well. Grief Works then got Apple's App of the Day.
Expect the unexpected!
Updating tracking on tools
The courses together contain over 100 mindfulness, meditation, breath work, sleep, fitness, productivity and motivational tools to help users in the moment. Each course came with its own bespoke set of tools, many of which I was responsible for designing and managing through the development process.
In hindsight, we did not run thorough qualitative analysis to properly understand which tools performed the best and were most popular. Had we done this, this would have shaped decisions for future courses.
The journal performed better than expected
Each product had its own journal so users could track their own progress within three categories subjective to the course e.g. ‘anxiety’ ‘happiness’ ‘productivity’ and refer back to key takeaways from the course. Our users really loved the journal feature as it would give them really valuable insights into their progress over time. After conducting qualitative research and realising the feature for note taking was a clear user need, we added it in so users could add additional information to their session.
Introducing ‘reflections’ to reinforce habit-forming change
A key problem from the company's mission statement was that users were not remembering content from self-development books. Therefore, it was essential that we gave users the highest chance possible for turning this wisdom into permanent change.
We designed, added and tested morning and evening reflections, habit checks, recaps and journal reviews. Users responded really positively to these it allowed them the chance to solidify their knowledge.
Reducing cognitive demand with the sessions redesign
User testing gave us clear insights that our sessions were too cognitively demanding. We revisited our competitors and looked closely at the apps, Noom, Calm, Masterclass and Audible and saw the clearl differences in their design compared to us. We removed the long, heavy practice copy and replaced it with gradual animated text of bite-sized chunks of wisdom. We added more visuals; diagrams, infographics and tables. We also added an audio feature giving users the option to listen to the wisdom instead of having to read them. Our users really loved these changes reporting the courses to be more 'personal', 'fun', and 'engaging'.
100,000+ users reporting feeling better, 700+ reviews and App of the Day
We did it...although perhaps not exactly by the book!
Overall, the results from the illume products were extremely positive. We achieved what we set out to do. We turned the wisdom from world-leading authors into actionable, habit-forming courses for long-term change and the results were fantastic.
Joy amongst the chaos, and lessons learned!
We built something great, with significant impact and with a team of highly intelligent, enthusiastic individuals. However, looking back, there are multiple ways we could have improved things, creating more value for the users and saving money, time and energy for the company and its employees.
We should have rigorously tested the course design and content up front to validate it before waiting for the live product to be ready. We could have had a more efficient, and by-the-book development process instead of the CEO asking for e.g the Help Me Now feature to be finished yesterday (a good story for another time). I implemented sprint methodology and JIRA only 1.5 years into my time there, this should have been done earlier.
Deliverables
Product Management, Research and Design for multiple apps over 3 years.
Design Team
Nick Begley, Dr. George MacKerron, Katie Brown, Linda Shaw, Jamie Sandhu
