Autoimmune health coaching service: product research and design

Client: Mymee • 2021-2022 • My role: Lead Product Designer, UX researcher

Challenge

Mymee is the first company to use health tracking to pinpoint dietary and environmental triggers that cause autoimmune symptoms. I was one of their beta testers in 2012.

I was embedded with this team as a researcher and product designer for a year. In that time I helped with many different initiatives: in-depth customer research, designing and shipping patient-facing features for mobile and web, optimizing the web app and checkout experience, and designing a new patient management tool for health coaches. 

Company goals I helped support:

• Reduce the burden of health tracking

• Communicate the value of the program and increase revenue

• Create a more transparent and effective client onboarding experience

Team

Our product team was comprised of:

• Head of Product

• Product Manager

• Junior Product Designer whom I collaborated with daily

• Developers located primarily in Portugal

• I also worked closely at times with health coaches, the lead naturopath and rheumatologist, and the heads of marketing and client success

Research, synthesis and strategy

Discovery

For our initial research, we set out to answer two questions:

• What problems do autoimmune patients face?

• How does Mymee help?

As an autoimmune patient myself, I had managed my symptoms and treatments for years; but I knew my experience was unique.

Research activities I led:

• Surveyed 50+ autoimmune patients about the problems they face (largely volunteers from my startup Pictal Health’s mailing list)

• Surveyed 5 prior Mymee clients

• Reviewed online community message boards to understand what problems patients were talking about

• Reviewed 100 Mymee testimonials

• Reviewed 10 n-of-1 case studies

• Interviewed health coaches

Synthesis & findings

After an initial synthesis in google docs, I moved key insights over to a Miro board and worked with team members to group them. I illustrated the key themes, and color coded the insights by source so we could understand which ones cut across categories. Below are the problems autoimmune patients face; we had a similar one called ‘how Mymee helps.’

A few key problems:

• Patients can’t count on themselves. It’s hard to work, travel, exercise, or do the things they want to do.

• They feel out of control.

• They are often not taken seriously and can’t find a doctor who will listen and believe them.

I shared these on a company-wide call, and gave everyone access to the Miro board.

We also started a research insights Slack channel, where I posted an ‘insight of the day’ for a period of time. We aimed to socialize our findings and help spread them through the company.

Finally, I organized client testimonials according to the themes we had uncovered, so they would be easier for the marketing team to work with.

This discovery work helped our team in many ways:

• Our broader team built a common understanding of the problems patients face

• We set the stage for the creation of content (blog posts, video) that spoke directly to patients’ key problems

• The design team was prepped to create products that were sensitive to patients’ lived experience

How Mymee works: concept video & testing

The team had originally asked me to create a journey map to show how Mymee works and the impact the program can make. We tried a few variations, but what what I’d learned through the research process did not lend itself to a simple, marketing-friendly visual.

Instead, I created a short, illustrated concept video, aiming to parcel out Mymee’s story in more digestible pieces - and speaking directly to the problems we’d heard in our research.

I tested it with a number of patients who had autoimmune conditions or Long Covid, and multiple of them said it felt like the video had been created just for them; it was a great example of research-driven content. The image below especially resonated:

Below is the full video, narrated by me. I enjoyed being the ‘voice talent.’ This was up on the Mymee YouTube channel for quite awhile.

Design principles

I have found design principles to be a simple way for teams to keep important research findings in mind. I put together this small set of principles, which our design team referred to along the way. For example, for patients with crushing fatigue, we had to be respectful of energy and strive to take the ‘work’ out of tracking.

Seeing opportunities with a client experience map

Because we were offering a digitally-supported service, it was important to see across the full client journey. After multiple rounds of research, I put together a journey map to clarify our process while highlighting clients’ key questions and pain points. I also noted opportunities where we could intervene to improve their experience. This was a helpful conversation tool for our product team.

For example:

• Pain point: it was not easy for clients to see how they were doing.

• Opportunities: more visualizations of tracked data, see your triggers in the app, see goals and wins, see your progress on specific interventions.

Product design

Mobile app refinement and vision

Along with my design partner Patricia, we cleaned up the basic screens and structure of the Mymee app while exploring new features, like data visualization for different input types. I focused on micro-interaction improvement, copy updates, concepting for data visualizations, and other tweaks.

Mee Map: a new, visual survey for onboarding and checking in

Problem: Mymee’s onboarding paperwork was long and burdensome, and it was difficult for clients to get through. There was also no simple way to ‘take the pulse’ of how a client was doing, apart from having them complete burdensome assessments at intervals.

Solution: a very brief, but still context-rich onboarding quiz. In partnership with the team’s rheumatologist, naturopath, and coaches, I helped pull together a set of simple questions that, taken together, would give a sense of how the client is functioning. Many of these themes came straight from our initial research. We envisioned having clients complete this survey in the app at intervals through their treatment, so they could see their progress over time. We played with different ways of presenting this information visually. Below is a prototype:

We also explored an alternate radial visual representation, which tested well, and we were moving in this direction before I moved on from the team.

This feature had not yet launched when I moved on from this project, but it was exciting work.

Web app launch, checkout flow optimization

When I joined, the product team was in the middle of building a web application.

Problem: the checkout flow was not yet optimized, and the core purpose of the web app was unclear, leading to team friction and wasted energy.

Solution: We optimized the checkout flow to emphasize Mymee’s value, and I helped facilitate discussions that led us to focus the web app scope on account management.

New product: client management tool for health coaches

Problem: Health coaches’ client management toolset was document-based and offered limited data analytics capabilities.

Approach:

• The usual PM/product development process: meet with users to determine their needs, document requirements, plan, sketch, prototype and test in 1-on-1 usability/feedback sessions. My design partner Patricia lead prototype creation, and I critiqued and contributed to our design.

• Wrangle information with a concept relationship diagram, which helped us understand what information we were designing for, and how that information should relate. This helped the dev team plan for necessary data model changes.

• Learn from being a client myself: Everyone at the company was able to receive health coaching, so I took advantage of this offer. While a client, I discovered ways of organizing my own information that helped me communicate better with my coach, and that helped my coach track me over time. Some of these ideas made it into our designs. 

• Attend the coaches’ weekly meeting to review and vet prototypes, ask questions, and make sure we were heading in the right direction.

We tweaked the below client list view many times, in an effort to remove everything that was not mission critical. We aimed to keep it calm and soothing, while highlighting things that might need follow-up - like whether a client did not have an appointment scheduled.

We heard loud and clear that coaches needed to be able to take notes while also looking at client data. We designed a collapsible panel for sessions that would be available in each client’s profile.

Outcome: uncertain, but the process still yielded valuable insight.

Team leadership

Over time, I contributed to the product strategy and roadmap, presented prototypes to the company and board, and took on other leadership tasks as needed.

I also planned and helped facilitate a week-long product team retreat, with collaborative exercises in Miro, presentations, and side activities for small groups. Below is a product ecosystem map I created, with team notes on top of it.

Outcome

Progress toward goals:

• We shipped mobile app features that reduce the burden of health tracking

• Our new checkout flow better communicated the value of the program

• We laid the groundwork for a more transparent, effective and less burdensome client onboarding experience

• And we came together around a shared vision for a better client management tool