Addressing low employee engagement and high turnover, Vitaance empowers companies to boost productivity through holistic wellness initiatives for physical, social, and mental wellbeing.
As Vitaance's 1st employee, and being part of the investor's team, I assumed the responsibility for crafting the concept from scratch and establishing its foundational elements.
š©š» ROLE
Lead Designer. Spearheaded the project's design strategy and foundations while overseeing and mentoring other 3 designers to execute the vision
ā³ TIMELINE
June 2021 - February 2022
š„ IMPACT
5Mā¬ raised in funding
Engagement boost from 15% to 60% in 6 months
TL;DR
As the first product designer, I collaborated closely on launching Vitaance, a platform for boosting employee engagement, with constrained time and resources. While the initial proposal gained engagement, we identified flaws during development, leading the team to pivot. It was an invaluable learning experience that allowed me to grow significantly.
What I worked on:
Set design and product direction
Outlined architecture and user experience
Directed and executed research efforts
Crafted mobile and admin panel designs
Created a scalable design system
Led 3 other designers
THEĀ OPPORTUNITY
The cost of employee burnout š„ for companies is,
unsurprisingly, quite high.
Disengaged employees have 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity and 15% lower profitability. When that translates into money, you're looking at the cost of 34% of a disengaged employee's annual salary
Source: How to Calculate the Cost of Employee Disengagementš¤ How might we assist companies in enhancing employee engagement, reducing absenteeism and burnout, and stemming employee turnover?
šÆ Challenge: Create an engaging and interactive solution that promotes employee wellbeing while maintaining a fun and healthy environment.
š Goal: Boost employee's engagement, aiming for 54% of weekly active users, serving as our guiding metric for success.
Initial research revealed a high level of burnout and a big penetration of wearables and fitness apps.
Over 120 participants took part in a quantitative study, which I complemented with user interviews. Here are some key findings (data from 2021):
Defining the wellbeing pillars, goals and MVP
Vitaance aimed at offering wellbeing initiatives around the 4 main pillars: mental, financial, physical and social. Given low penetration of mental apps and that the survey results shown that 78% people does exercise to feel better, we decided to tackle the physical pillar first.
ā
We rapidly developed a web progressive app within 2 weeks for user testing and securing investment. Based on the learnings, we began architecting the MVP
Inspired by Nir Eyal's model, we designed a gamified flow where users join physical activity challenges, earn points, and redeem rewards.
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And the defined the high level architecture:
In this 1st version we did not invest in UI. We took a UIĀ kit, designed main screens and quickly shipped.
First RESULTS
Ā š When we launched, hardly anyone engaged with it...
Customer insights and user interviews revealed that small engagement we had was driven by internal competitions and peer comparisons. We realized our mistake was designing individual activities when users wanted to participate alongside and compete against colleagues.
To explore integrating a social component, we planned a design sprint.
We began by defining goals, questions, participants, and activities. First, we did a comparative analysis. Then, to expedite the process, we conducted a focus group with HR professionals and employees.
During the focus group, the product team took notes, which were later organized into a 'How Might We' board.
We pinpointed the most relevant "How Might We" statements, did some research of other platforms and sketched potential solutions. They were presented during a heatmapping session to the focus group participants and gathered feedback.
The heatmapping session revealed strong interest in the leaderboard concept, so we focused our efforts on developing that idea further.
We defined mid-fidelity wireframes and presented them to leadership. After negotiating certain trade-offs, we secured buy-in to proceed with the leaderboard feature.
To validate the leaderboard concept, I spearheaded an initiative where we invited beta testers to take part in a two-week team challenge. After confirming interest with 40 participants, we officially launched the challenge.
After launching, we observed that monthly active users jumped from 15% to 60% in 3 months š„³
Building on this success, we added global rankings and saw even more people getting involved and interacting with our platform.
After validating the concept, we focused our efforts in improving usability and visuals, creating a new branding and design system.
In parallel, we had worked on creating a software to support back-office tasks that evolved to a dashboard for customers
It initially enabled operations staff to manage customers and perform back-office tasks. This application was later extended for use by HR teams, allowing them to view company-wide activity metrics and launch tailored challenges and rewards programs.
Outcomes
1.5K users in the first 12 months
The app reached 1.5K users during the first year, and kept growing afterwards.
Unexpectedly, the biggest mass of people were iPhone users, with a 60%.
Results
The app had good engagement but lagging sales. The challenge was finding companies that valued combining wellness and life insurance into one app experience. Realizing a strategic shift was needed, I helped build awareness around pivoting. However, I transitioned to a new project before finalizing the pivot strategy.
Ultimately, the team dropped the life insurance integration to focus solely on wellness and employee benefits features. Though on a new project, I stayed involved with Vitaance through the investor team.
š People I collaborated with:
Ana Zamora, Christian Rochas, Bernard Granados (Founders), Rufat Mirza (PO), Farrukh Pervaiz, Camila Rengifo, Daniel HernƔndez (dev team),
Carlos Moreno (Ops) Jose Llorens, Natalia Calero (Marketing) & Coax Team.
