Envisioning the future of personal health journaling

The what

CaringBridge’s mobile app was dated and not keeping pace with user expectations and modern app standards. There was very low app usage and donations from the app were lagging behind the responsive website.

The business teams at CaringBridge were uncomfortable driving traffic to the app for fear of losing donations and allowing users to have a bad brand experience. In addition, outdated technology did not support the desired app capabilities and limited the ability to build and maintain the type of experience they wanted for their users.

How it Started

We partnered with CaringBridge to envision what a future state app experience could look like. Our team conducted stakeholder interviews to gain insight on the current state, we ran a future state workshop, and co-prioritized key features to place on a roadmap.

A simple and intuitive app experience was designed and was tailored towards 2 user types, journal authors and page visitors. A large focus of the app was on prompting users to post more journal entries as well as prompting page visitors for donations. Our team built two prototypes to demonstrate the app experience and to test with app users prior to development.

Creating a Page

To prepare the organization for implementation, our team identified epics and user stories that aligned to the designs.

Aligning screen flows to epics to prepare for hand-off

The Impact

Within a 10-week period, CaringBridge had a product roadmap, a full app design ready for usability testing, and a backlog of user stories to launch them into the implementation phase.

Key activities & deliverables:

  • Future state workshop

  • Product roadmap

  • Measurement strategy

  • Guiding principles

  • 60+ UI screens and interactions + 2 prototypes

  • 200+ user stories and 14 epics

  • Initial estimate on engineering scope

  • Usability test plan

Visitor View

My Role

I was the Lead Product Designer. My primary objective was collaborating with Customer Strategy, Developers, Product Owners, and the CaringBridge C-Suite to ideate on the future of the app as well as pairing up with Junior Designers to execute designs based on the desired approach. Our team helped support storytelling for donor engagement that would ultimately allow for a Phase 2 that included usability testing, design refinement, and a full build of the new experience.

This work was created at Slalom Consulting.