Wellory

Founded in 2020, Wellory’s mission is to disrupt diet culture and to make personalized nutrition accessible for all. Wellory is the first anti-diet app that delivers 1-1 personal nutrition coaching. Clients are matched to their Wellory coaches based on their goals with a meal-by-meal approach, building one new habit at a time.

When a coach leaves there is a whole client history and a future plan to transition to the new coach. The current transition process is time-consuming that is handled manually by the Wellory team. It also lacks collaboration between the coaches.

This is a pain point for Wellory for three main reasons:

1. Automate the transition process between the coaches by a) streamlining the information required for the new coach to start the client relationship and b) introducing accountability so that knowledge isn’t lost in transition.

2. Get clients excited about the upcoming change by providing them with a specialized onboarding experience for the transition.

A week-long research process was conducted with the Wellory team and clientele to understand the following:

1. Causes of friction in the transition process between coaches and clients in the current version of the app

2. Elements of manual work that lie in the existing knowledge sharing framework between coaches

3. Issues that the Wellory team face when a coach leaves

4. What is working well for both Wellory and the client in the current transition process

I set out to understand the current process by speaking to Wellory’s co-founder and coach operations manager. I used a user journey map to get me thinking of design opportunities arising from each step.

After I had a better understanding of the current process I spoke to three sets of users to better understand how they felt when they went through the transition process: 1) Coaches 2) Coach operations manager and 3) Wellory clients & users from outside the industry to gain a different perspective on the issue.

I also went through Wellory’s cancellation feedback form responses from the past year and found that some clients had canceled for the very problem I am trying to solve.

It was clear after the research phase that I had to design a solution for 3 sets of users: 1) New Coach 2) Coach operations manager and 3) Client. I created their user profiles based on research and I used these to guide me through the ideation phase to help me differentiate between each user’s goals.

Once I had user insights and it was clear who I was designing for I started creating the low-fi concepts for the primary use cases while keeping Wellory business goals in mind.

I started by first mapping out the client information needed for a complete transition then I designed those into smaller tasks within the offboarding/onboarding dashboard where coaches can complete them as part of the transition.

Initially, I came up with 2 versions of the coach offboarding/onboarding dashboard. Both versions had a similar concept of completing tasks. Version 1 was similar to patterns used within Wellory’s UI and consisted of tasks shown in a vertical stack of accordion blocks while version 2 showed tasks in a horizontal stack of modular blocks.

Ultimately I went with version 2 as I felt modular blocks allowed me to utilize space efficiently and kept the overall horizontal space of the dashboard the same allowing the user to focus on one task at a time while with version 1 having the tasks on top of each other could create visual clutter.

1. For Clients

Making the client in charge

When a client’s coach is leaving, the client undergoes a new specialized onboarding to choose between the Wellory handpicked coach or between other coaches.

2. For Coaches

Complete client transition tasks

Once a new coach has been selected by the client, the offboarding/onboarding feature for coaches streamlines the transition by automatically transferring client history to a new tab within their dashboard and brings accountability by introducing checks.

3. For Coach Operations Manager

Track transfers automatically

The manual aspect of the transition process has been largely eliminated for the coach operations manager as the client questionnaire would be an activated task that lives within the coach’s dashboard. Due to the accountability factor, the coach manager is able to track the completion of transfers.

The product was tested amongst clients, coaches, and the Wellory team at the high fidelity stage to see if the product worked as intended. There were a few visual changes that were made as a result to improve certain usability aspects. The good news was that task completion was at 100%.

This is a real-world problem for Wellory. If Wellory was to adopt the solution for this problem the impact could be felt as follows:

On a monthly basis if we assume 2 coaches leave, on average that is 36 (18 x 2) clients who have to be transitioned if we use the median amount of clients supported by a part-time coach.

That is potentially 36 unhappy clients who can resort to unsubscribing. If we assume the new transition process can retain 80% of those clients that is ~29 clients who are continuing their subscription.

~$1,440 (29 x $50) of revenue per month or $17,280 per year is captured for Wellory since more clients would be retained due to new transition experience.

In the future, this number would be inflated given coaches will be taking on more clients.

This was my first project where I worked directly with a client and I’d like to say a huge thank you to Jeni Fahy, co-founder of Wellory who believed in me and was so kind and welcoming in letting me work so closely with her for this project.

1. Working with a client

Working directly with a client showed me real-life complex problems that exist currently and can in the future for a company of Wellory’s size. This allowed me to think within the constraints of Wellory’s current technological abilities and design a product within their current UI.

2. Being open to pivoting project scope

This project had a different scope initially. It changed as I went through customer feedback and started noticing a pattern in a particular type of feedback around Wellorist transfers. Once I brought this up to Jeni it turned out this was a pain point for Wellory. I learned one shouldn’t be so fixated on a particular scope and be open to adjusting.

3. Looking ahead

The next step would be to automate the client questionnaire by integrating it within a survey software such as Typeform. If Wellory was to adopt this process, beta testing can inform how it is performing especially as Wellory scales. A way of measuring success would be to observe the client drop-off rates after this new transition process is implemented.