The Real (2.0) MVP
Real is a mental wellness startup offering content-based care at scale.
My Role
Senior Product Designer (Interaction, Visual, Content, Writing) for the Core Content Experience
Team
PM: Kiran Rao
Challenge
The business hit a plateau with our first product that provided traditional therapy sessions called “Pathways.” A single Pathway could take someone months to complete and required a lot of focused attention and effort from the user. The data showed that our market size was limited by the types of users that would be successful with app.
Idea
To improve our product-market fit, we shifted from our initial design requiring linear long user sessions to one centered around non-linear flexible user sessions with content consumption as care.
Backed by data from our first product and a clinical research study done by our team, the idea was to meet most people where they are in their mental health journey in a format that felt intuitive and familiar - serving content that is personalized based on consumption and feedback loops. This would enable us to get Real into the hands of more users that could get content-based mental health care that is both accessible and effective.
Scope & Constraints
PD&E was tasked with designing and launching our new MVP in 5 months (January 2023 → June 1, 2023). Product was a small versatile team that was broken down into PD/PM partners for two pillars: 1) Onboarding and Account, 2) Core Content Experience.
My role was the sole designer for the Core Content Experience Pillar. Together with my PM partner, Kiran, we outlined, scoped, and prioritized 50+ features we would launch with based on user needs, stakeholder input, business goals, and engineering capacity.
Our constraints would be time, including audio-based content, and a native app environment.
An oversimplified timeline:
Research
““If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.””
As a pair, we researched 10 top-performing apps to help us envision the core content experience of our new MVP. We consolidated our research into specific opportunities we felt confident would help us reach our business goals :
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Showing a new user that we understand them helps them trust that we can support them
Continuously access user attraction or engagement for the content they engage in
Build the expectation of relevance
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Make diving into content effortless
Predictable content release cadences
Content that follows users through their day
Simple and clear playing experience
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Where a user starts and stops their experience is up to them
Content completion leads to more possible content paths
a place to reference content history and favorites, reducing cognitive demand for finding content that a user knows they like
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User-Generated Content
Intimate, shared experiences
Take traditionally off-platform shared experience and turn it into an on-platform experience
Information Architecture
Across both teams there was alignment that we would use a bottom navigation for our mobile app. I explored 3 main structures for the Core Content Experience - Home, Discover, and the Content Player that would be the center of everything.
IA principles applied:
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The paradox of choice states that a greater number of options increases cognitive load and makes it more difficult for people to make decisions. So we only want to offer a focused set of choices that are meaningful to our users.
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The content you have today is a fraction of the content you will have tomorrow. A designer can craft a page to anticipate new content forms, such as video, presentations, photo galleries, etc.
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Cognitive scientists have discovered that our brains represent categories as networks of good examples. Descriptions don’t work so well. Instead, we can best explain what’s in a category by showing some good examples of its contents.
Design
Building the experience
With the bones laid out, I gathered my references and began designing the different screens and steps of the core content experience. Over the course of 3 weeks, the designs went through many rounds of review, feedback, and alignment with folks from every team at the company represented including C-suite, Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Product, Content, and Clinical.
Features I owned included: home page, event page, event registration, listening activity, saved audio, content player, content details, sharing, search bar, filtering, displaying recommendations, content collections, browse by topic, escalated care, etc.
We iterated on the user flows until we had the functionality locked down before I started applying visual design, content, and UX writing to the high-fidelity designs.
Pivots
This was around the time when we onboarding a new member of the C-suite. He came in hot with feedback and hard hitting questions about the designs we presented to him. This lead to a fever pitch week of design to find a solution that would get alignment at all levels of the company.
Cross-functional Collaboration
As I was designing the app experience, we had a team of therapist, content producers, and audio engineers simultaneously creating the content that would fill the app. We had a branding team that was sourcing film photography to go with the content.
I worked collaboratively with content, brand, and engineering to ensure a smooth transition from design to content upload to production. I worked closely with my PM partner and engineering to refine the designs within the constraints of our CMS Brightspot.
Bringing the Experience to Life
Impact
We were able to build a content experience that was flexible and robust enough to support the non-linear content consumption habit of a larger market segment we had not seen success with. We successfully launched on schedule and during our soft launch, was able to see positive reception and a 20% increase in overall app downloads before a full Go-To-Market campaign.
Retrospective
Having a healthy obsession with the company mission really challenged me to flex all of the design skills I’ve accumulated over the years into this project. I would have loved to have more time in the beginning to strategize and test as we built this version of Real, but I’m so proud of the way the team navigated through our constraints and made it all happen. (See my colleague’s post about the launch)