Revolutionizing Wellness with a $1.5B+ Glucose-Monitoring App Design

Date completed: 2023

Role: As the Product Design Lead (App), my role encompassed defining the future-state vision with C-Suites, to designing hi-fidelity screens, to working closely with developers to Design QA, to coaching my client counterparts in all stages of design, to launching the product and continuously gathering qualitative and quantitative user feedback

Key Contributions: Scalable design system, App design, Product Launch, Qualitative and quantitative insights machine

TL;DR

This was McKinsey’s largest global business build of 2023. We partnered with a major MedTech company to help build their first consumer wearable product that translates data from a physical continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to an app. I led the app design for 200+ edge cases, across 300+ screens and worked closely with developers to build, QA and launch the product in 2 large European markets with a fast-follow in the US. Additionally, I led a future-state visioning workshop with C-Suite executives to define the next stage of the product.

The Impact

The project opened up a $1.5B+ market, creating 200 jobs, 500+ customer touchpoints through the end-to-end delivery of 3 products: a direct-to-consumer website to market the app, the app, and a go-to-market strategy.

72% (n=360) of beta users indicated positive experience (4.5 out of 5) when onboarding the app, including ease of use connecting the wearable device with the app. 65% (n=325) of beta users shared a very positive experience (5 out of 5) with the delivery and packaging.

The App

The app consisted of 5 key components:
i) a hero screen that shows a user’s heart-rate in real-time reflected by the textures and colors of the wave,
ii) a live graph that translates heart rate to intuitive visualizations,
iii) personalized wellness tips for daily practices,
iv) a daily and weekly “Spotify-wrapped” of their data and
v) a profile for users to track their progress over time.

This project was extremely complex due to the multifaceted stakeholder ecosystem across the regulatory, science, brand, UX, and engineering teams. In particular, designing the live graph was a massive UX challenge: the glucose monitor could only send data to the app in intervals of 5 minutes, while brand wanted to market the product as a “real-time live graph”. To add to the complexity, the science team wanted to use red and green colors to indicate negative vs. positive glucose spikes even though those colors were not included in our design system. As a solve, we added a dot GIF to represent the “real-time-ness” of the graph while using lines to represent the actual live data. We tested additional colors with users and expanded our design system to included shades of orange and pink to represent negative and positive glucose while staying within brand guidelines.

My role was to advocate for strong UX without compromising on the clarity of the science, distinctiveness of the brand while ensuring the tech feasibility of the build. I translated research into quick prototypes to test and learn with users per sprint. I took a native-first data visualization approach to achieve simple sophistication and documented 200+ edge cases to ensure holistic documentation handoff to our engineering teams.

The Website

In addition to the app, we designed a direct-to-consumer website for the marketing and sale of the app. To that end, my team and I developed a scalable and responsive design system from scratch to work across native app and a mobile-responsive website.

The Process

All good design requires an iterative feedback process. I worked in 2-week sprints where user testing, refinement and design QA were baked into the process. In addition to the standard Agile ceremonies, we had 2x weekly jams across the complex stakeholder groups: design x engineering x science teams. I worked closely with the engineering teams to ensure a smooth design to dev hand-off. I also led several future-state visioning workshops to define the 2-5 year product roadmap.