Introduction

BodyGuide, a pain relief mobile app built by a multidisciplinary team of health professionals, hopes to empower users to manage chronic pain with customised programs, so users may

“Improve aches, tension and pain, whenever and wherever suits them.”

BodyGuide joint force with us to improve the current customer journey. I was part of this ambitious project, representing BodyGuide to boost motivations and help people achieve fuller lives without pain blockers.

The challenge 

Though BodyGuide’s customer base has been steadily growing since late 2020, they wanted to retain their reputation and refine their product based on customer feedback. Their current vision is that BodyGuide is for everyone. The main focus for this project was increased customer engagement, leading to customer acquisition in the AUS and US markets.

They came up with an assumptive solution — gamification.  

Goals 

After the initial client meeting, we determined that in order to scale, we had to define early adopters, along with the following goals:

Role

My major contributions:

• Stakeholder workshop

• Usability test

• Blockers for chronic pain patients research

• User interviews

• Crazy8s

• Paper prototyping

• Figma prototype

Timeline: 2.5 weeks 

Platform: Mobile app

Team: Jasmine Cheng (Me), Bec Fawcett, Lucinda Gardiner, Rachel King

Introduction to the solution 

Spoiler alert: Through user research, we concluded gamification was not the solution for BodyGuide. Instead, what users needed was trust in value, flexibility to adjust, and triggers to motivate. We focused on 3 main features as our MVPs:

1. Streak counter and progress tracker to represent visible progress

2. Time fragmented exercises for users to easily digestible exercises and maintain flexibility 

3. Daily reminders to trigger actions and help implement new habits into user’s current lifestyle

Where we started—

Where does BodyGuide currently sit?

Using a competitive analysis looking at features offered and the unique selling point of similar apps in the market we identified BodyGuide currently has low tracking ability and high feature inventory.

We conducted 4 usability tests to understand the flow of the current BodyGuide app

I then synthesised the data points by affinity mapping, 4 out of 4 users gave the following feedback:

• The home screen and structure of the exercises were confusing

• The product needed to show more value in the price for long term usage

• The content was professional in presentation

Surveys and user interviews— 

To collect more quantitative and qualitative data, I conducted 1/3 user interviews with people who currently use BodyGuide, 6/19 interviews with people who were dealing with chronic pain conditions, and a survey posted on channels like Reddit, slack, and other social media platforms.

We received 33 survey responses mainly from Australia and the US and collected 1300+ data points from user interviews.

Secondary market research—

Synthesising research—What we found

1. Users trust healthcare specialists based on their knowledge and expertise. 

2. It is time consuming to go through 3 channels for a specialist. However, physios play an important role in patients’ pain management journey due to the Medicare Benefits Scheme. We identified an opportunity here where their patients could be the early adopters for BodyGuide (addressed in future steps)

3. Users prioritise relaxation and other commitments over pain management exercises due lack of significant improvement in the short term

4. People did not use pain management apps because:

• It did not fit their needs, thus lacking their fulfillments 

• The apps did not provide visible value, causing lack of trust

• They did not know pain management apps existed

The Persona

Problem statement

“Riley needs a way to maintain their pain management exercises so that they can reduce their overall pain.”

We then selected three different angles we planned to attack the problem from.

1. A way to monitor users progress so that they are held accountable

2. Make sure the exercises are easy to complete

3. Show consistency will lead to long term gain in recovery

Feature prioritisation

Task flow and user flow

Sketches

How do these new features meet the business goals?

• Progress tracking and reminders trigger actions, in which will increase the time spent on BodyGuide 

• Identifying BodyGuide as an informational app, the goal is to provide pain relief. The benefit to the user is result driven value and therefore causes an increase in engagement 

• Differentiated fragmented exercises will reach a broader range of people by the inherent nature that people don’t all want the same things.

• Customer acquisition is aided by the WOM spread of users. Validated through interviewing users on how they find specific pain relief solutions.

Next steps

New business model

Through research, we recommend changing to a new business model of B2B2C (Business to Business to Consumer). The way this new business model will work is that BodyGuide can connect with Physiotherapists/Healthcare specialists to turn the app into a program that they help run. This helps to pinpoint the early adopters for the product, and links back to our goals of accountability and trust.

New payment options

In line with the new business model of B2B2C, healthcare professionals (ie; Physio) can pay a yearly contract fee to integrate BodyGuide’s service in their clinic, patients can pay a small fee to download the app, then the physios “incur” the cost of the subscription fee but slightly adjust the bill to balance the cost. 

Find this a real pizza work? 🍕

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