Goodself is a social media application that centers health and wellness. It aims to create an ecosystem of trusted health and wellness content. According to the WHO, "Experts and health professionals are among those best placed to refute misinformation and direct users to information sources that are evidence-based" (WHO, 2022). There are three main 3 areas that set Goodself apart from other social media apps:
Most of the value of the Goodself app is derived from the content posted by health professionals who share content in their expertise. However non-health professional users of Goodself are an important part of the ecosystem. Given, that Goodself it in a startup phase it's important to ensure that the users who are on the app can meaningfully engage, regardless of their user-type.
Moreover, Goodself is a mobile-first application. However, does not accommodate to different modes of engaging with content across-devices.
As such, there challenges leave us with 2 main problem questions:
I was the main point of contact for UX Design for interns, developers and the team. This entailed spearheading design sprints, and being closely involved in product planning and direction.
The Goodself team worked on a weekly Agile sprint basis. At the end of one sprint, our product manager and team defined tasks for the following week. This kept the design process quite dynamic and enabled me adapt to a fast-paced environment.
My role involved balancing internal design requirement and evolving product needs. If I were to summarize my work with Goodself, there were 5 main priorities that I took ownership of:
Jumping into this role, one of the most important things I had to orient myself around was understanding it's two distinct users: the Expert and the User.
A shift in user goals was apparent -reflecting a critical point in time. Users were seeking more community features and stronger connections with like-minded individuals. Expert users where seeking more autonomy in curating customized spaces and multi-device flexibility with how to interact with the app given their busy schedules.
Goodself is a mobile-first application, during my time on the team, I spearheaded the design of the the Goodself web-app. This process consisted of creating a design system and keeping consistent communication with the newly established web development team.
The Goodself app contains a lot of features, some of which may be considered higher priority than others. Designing the web app was reminiscent of creating an MVP. Because the website development was projected to take over 4 months, deciding what to phase out proved to be a challenge. I, along with the project manager, and web developers spent a considerable amount of time mapping the feasibility and value-urgency of features to establish what can be considered the "distilled" Goodself experience.
Some of the highest priority features included sign in, interacting with posts, create posts, upload and mange groups. Furthermore, we had to prioritize our expert users as the decision to create the web app was based on their needs.
I noticed inconsistencies with regards to the designs across different mobile screens. When approaching the web design, I felt that establishing clear guidelines was a necessity. With approval from our project manage and founder, I employed an 8pt grid system and communicated these update to the rest of the design team.
Applying 8pt (with minor applications of 4pt) margins and spacing was a big step in terms of achieving internal design consistency. This ultimately not only led to visual consistency but also improved the translation from design to development.
Difficulties locating components were apparent. For the web-app, I thought it was important to avoid replicating these difficulties. As a result, I researched an implemented atomic-design. It is an approach to organizing design systems in a way that prioritized hierarchy.
Ultimately, I used atomic design as a set of guidelines based on the needs of the web app rather than a rigid structure to follow. Please see below a small sample of how I sorted certain components.
The team was facing a gap in design to development - we identified this as a main way to increase efficiency in the team. In addition to documenting design assets and creating a l easy-to-follow design system, I also spearheaded the implementation of internal design standards like progress design progress tracking and design annotation. I also created documents including a detailed design to development hand-off checklist, standards for tracking new features, and How-to Figma tutorials among other aspects. Here is an overview of the documentation pages I created.
I also formalized the use colors and typographic scale. This significantly impacted internal design consistency, especially as new designers began to familiarize themselves with the designs.
Goodlself's focus is to on highlighting trustworthy content from expert professionals. As a result, non health-professional users of the app are not as engaged in creating content as they would be on other platforms.
As a result, we implemented a profile redesign to include an 'Interests' tab when users could focus on personalization (beyond of posting content).
The groups feature was one of the major features that I designed. It consisted of several sub-features and was quite information-architecture heavy. Below is an overview of the Groups:
Seeing that there are several features and points of contact for the groups section, it's important to understand the user flow of the groups section.
Aside from groups, Some other community-based features that I worked on included challenges, and redesigning of content discovery!
I led the integration of a usability testing in the product development process, by creative and executing several testing sessions primarily through www.usertesting.com. Through insights from testing, we were able to validate or iterate upon our app features.
Some KPIs that were used to measure engagement include the number of groups/challenges created.
Spearheading efforts in redesign and community centered prototypes led to roughly a 14% increase in engagement.
Features that I designed were shipped to thousands of users.
Find out more about Goodself below:
The agile sprint environment
Working with a live development team pushed me to be a better designer. The weeklong agile sprint model led to shorted turn-over of design to app.
Internal design consistency extends beyond 'internal'
Internal design consistency is an important factor that impacts all stages of the development process, and final live product.
User Personas do not have to be static
User personas are often treated as a reference point made during the discovery phase of the design process. Working with Goodself highlighted that user goals and needs can grow and shift.
User or Product?
Advocating for the user while balancing product requirement and deadlines proved to be challenging. Nevertheless, I learned that centering user voices through usability testing can provide invaluable insights for product direction.
