At Weconnect, our ultimate goal was to decrease the 60% relapse rate of substance use among outpatients in recovery during their first year. We had a business goal to acquire more outpatient clinics and members to use our recovery support products, but to prove our products worked, we had to increase engagement and retention. I was hired as the company’s second designer to collaborate with a Product Manager and a scrappy Engineering team to increase engagement in Version 2 of the recovery app and add additional support through the Clinician product.

Role: Product Designer

Platforms: Native Mobile (iOS & Android)

Support Recovery App

When I joined WEconnect, our business goals were to acquire more clinics to purchase and use our recovery products. To do this, we needed to prove our products actually helped engage users in their recovery routines.

Through previous research, subject matter experts, and interviewing customers, I discovered core insights about our customers engagement:

• Outpatients new to recovery worry about losing motivation from lack of structure to maintain healthy habits they formed while in clinic.

• They are afraid of feeling judged by their friends, family, and support system.

I also researched a number of growth design techniques, and behavioral therapy modalities.

The crafted solution to motivate members to create and complete self-care and support routines was to focus the core experience around gamification and contingency management.

Our goal was to increase activation, engagement, and retention for the 1st year of recovery.

I designed time challenges to provide structure and a concrete deadline to motivate members to complete their routines.

In these challenges, I utilized a progress bar and a routine counter to reinforce their progress.

Monetary rewards at the end of each challenge were utilized and contingency management was used to motivate members in completing their routines.

It was critical that the messaging copy remained encouraging no matter how they performed to motivate patients to stay positive and motivated.

As challenge rewards got farther apart, streaks ensured retention with bigger celebrations and larger rewards.

Lastly, to encourage activation and overall engagement, I utilized micro-interactions and animations to communicate feedback and progress.

Clinician Messaging Platform

After increasing engagement through the recovery app, the Director of Product wanted to add additional support through the Clinician Product. The initial functionality of the Clinician Product only allowed clinicians to track patient progress in self-care and support routines. After much team discussion, I began discovery for a new clinician messaging feature.

Role: Product Designer

Platforms: Desktop and Mobile Web

In order to evaluate clinicians’ need for a messaging platform, I conducted clinician interviews. The most informative insight I received was clinicians’ need for a HIPPA-compliant way to message patients.

Too often, clinicians used their personal phones to text patients, risking data security, lack of auditing capabilities, and an ad-hoc way of keeping track of patient interactions.

After analyzing other messaging platforms, I collaborated with engineering to select a lean set of features for our messaging MVP. Since patients only messaged clinicians at their clinic, a simple UI for patients to send and receive messages is all they needed.

Providing permissions to assign patients to clinicians was out of scope, so I empowered clinicians with a follow-thread button to assign patients to themselves.

Every time a clinician navigated to messaging, there is an empty state notifying them of the number of unread messages from members they follow and ones that aren’t, helping prioritize messaging for their session.

If you would like an in-depth walk-through of this case study, contact me for an interview.