Improving Health Outcomes With a Collaborative Online Network of Wellness Professionals

My contributions on setting the vision of a new business and service offering which maintains a more holistic view of self-care and creates positive change

Client: WePulse

My roles: Sprint facilitator, User research, UX designer

Challenge

Creating an innovative business offer from scratch in the segment of wellness was the chosen challenge of an entrepreneur in the fitness segment in Brazil. Expanding from his expertise on physical activity, evident in successes such as Kikos Equipamentos, he put together a small team of strategists, designers, and developers with the mission of defining what his new business should be.

In my role as a designer and strategist, I had to translate the intent owner’s ambition into a vision, and helped testing its potential impact. Along with the initial team, we departed from the question “What is wellness?” and a brand name “Wepulse". From there we converged into a creative question to help us navigate uncertainty: "How can we offer a holistic wellness service to people that need to improve their health and wellbeing but don’t have enough information, money, time or motivation? How can we help wellness professionals with high abandonment rate and limitation to scale their treatments?

 Outcome 

Building on the learnings from the research and prototypes I designed, a functional web application was launched in the Brazilian market on sept 2019. The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) featured the functionalities that added more value according to usability tests and interviews me and other designers conducted. 

Lo-fidelity prototype with multiple functionalities. We tested this experience with people looking to improve their health habits, one of the customer profiles in WePulse two-side market business..

Product Thinking

My most significant contribution in the initial stage of the project was helping a team of strategists, designers and developers navigate uncertainty trough a design sprint. At that stage the sprint’s goal was to define a clear vision which the company could set as its main value proposition. We saw potential in the idea of a holistic approach to wellness in which different professionals could converge and collaborate on helping clients achieve their goals, either that was a nutrition, physical, mental state type of goal, or a combination of them.  

After the sprint, I conducted interviews with various professionals as well as potential users of the final service. For the professionals profile, we decided exclude doctors as they were submitted to more regulation. Instead we focused on physical trainers, nutritionists and psychotherapists, etc. For the final customer, we talked with people that saw these practices as both preventive and palliative activities.

Based on our analysis of the resulting conversations, we confirmed that wellness professionals were already willing to collaborate among themselves to deliver a more holistic treatment to their clients, including offering their services in targeted combinations. For the patients, however, the idea of being offered a more holistic approach to their medical and preventative healthcare was novel and unexpected. They were also concern that they wouldn’t be able to afford multiple professionals suggested through WePulse platform.

Prototyping

Our initial concept was received with excitement and curiosity, and after defining a list of main functionalities that arose from the interviews, we moved on to the more intensive product design phases. During the prototyping phase, I worked as a UX Designer. My major contribution in this stage was creating user journeys and low fidelity prototypes.

Before jumping into designing the screens and writing the user stories, I translated all available information into two hierarchy models, one for the professionals and the other for the final customer. This was a key step to create a consensus of our offering among the different members on the team as well as an artifact for developers to preview the architectural requirements.

I started the design from the signup page, as it forced me to articulate the advantages offered by the service. I designed both the desktop prototype that targets professionals and the mobile version, that targeted the final customer. We used the prototype and card sorting activities to expose and help testers articulate the features that would better address their needs. 

The insight from these sessions were shared with the whole company in a presentation and guided the product and tech leads on defining the priorities for the MVP.

A low-fidelity prototype used in tests with the customer segment of professionals. There were three variations of it depending on the tester category: physical trainers, nutritionists, and psychotherapists. 

Takeaways

Wepulse is an exciting new business that will go through many iterations as it searches its sustainability. I am proud to have been part of setting its initial foundation, which informed the founders and investors that there is great potential for Wepulse to find a market fit by giving tools to professionals to expand their business and results through collaboration. And by giving people who aspire to live a better life to find the activities and professionals that help them reach their goals.

Credits

Murilo Alencar (CEO), Hugo Lucena (Head Product), Rafael Paranaiba (Designer), Luigi Bonventim, Guilherme Moscardi, Ismael Rodrigues (Business Strategists), Mario D’Ambros, Anderson Nobre, Filipe Cunha, Edivan Texeira (Developers).

Year

2019