Greatness is a lifestyle design and management app. It houses a vast library of habit programs, self-improvement courses, mental health coaching sessions, sounds and meditations – while also functioning as a habit tracker and routine planner, developed with expert behavior scientists and psychologists. In short – it’s like Spotify for personal growth.
The elevator pitch for this service is essentially rolling in all the essential mental wellbeing features into one. This created tremendous value that the user gets by choosing our single app rather than a handful separate ones. This is a great way to stand out in the market, but better yer - among users who benefit the most from this business model.
When I first joined Greatness, I really didn’t have time to get my feet wet. After the initial onboarding day and tour around the Kilo.Health office, we dove immediately into work. This type of “get shit done” approach was no news to me – having had my fair share of startup experience, I knew that the pace will be fast and there will be little room to take a breather. Boy, was I not prepared for the hyperspeed we’d be going at until the very end. Silicon Valley execs would be proud.
My role was simple – assemble a team and lead product design. From the look and feel, UX, usability, desirability, quality control, collaboration, handoff, stakeholder alignment, dreaming up new features, branding, guiding and growing the team, and much, much more – there simply was no end to the list. But at no point was that an issue – we gladly stepped outside our job descriptions and responsibilities, just to help each other out within the entire crew.
Next steps were relatively simple, and by this point in my career, fairly expected – a complete facelift.
The design files were a mess and the general UI direction was questionable at best – but nothing I haven’t seen before. A company would hire a design agency to cook up a quick UI which would be passable enough for an MVP release. Then, after a little while, when the service bares enough fruit, in-house designers can be hired to fix all the holes left from the first iteration. That’s where I came in.
The designs were okay, but far from Greatness (pun intended). We simply started from square one as the files were in no shape to be built upon. The vision for how it would look like was clear to me immediately – soft colorful gradients, trendy round components, shapes and images that speak to the future, rather than the past.
Before/after facelift
AI has matured enough where we could start experimenting with images. The results were far from perfect in the beginning, but decent enough to give us an edge in terms of time. Now, I must confess – at first, the thought of replacing vector illustrations with AI-generated images hurt the more traditional illustrator in me. But one must adapt to the times – what hurt at first, later became a massive advantage. I used my past experiences to pave the way for how we would approach, style, and compose images throughout the entire product. The speed at which we created the images afterwards was nothing short of amazing. I’m still in awe how futuristic this all feels.
New vs old components
▲ 26% - 31%
▲ 47.4%
The initial facelift immediately resonated with users and our trial-to-paid conversion metric rose by 5%-6% and stayed at this mark. It's an essential needle to move from a business perspective as well as validation that our move to redesign was the correct and profitable path to take. User engagement also role substantially - it beat the competition by 13% and remained higher than the norm by up to 7% on the 7 month mark (16.2% vs the competitions 13.8%)
Kickstarting the entire design side was never an easy task, especially on a product that’s so content-heavy – and was about to get even more content-heavy at a time that I joined the team. To accommodate this, we created a separate design library file (as is the standard practice).
The sheer amount of components created in such a short timeframe still amazes me – the cards alone have grown x3 times in quantity! Thankfully, we opted for the AI-first approach that enabled us to create visuals really quickly.
The facelift stage basically required us to create a sense of UI direction and fix minor UX issues along the way – which created a good opportunity to polish some of the features on the surface level. Given that this is a startup, we couldn’t polish all the features the way we wanted (more on that later), but some initiatives were larger than others, where we pulled out all the stops and completely redesigned them.
One such release was the ‘For you’ section – a custom-curated audio library that would house meditations, coaching sessions, sleep sounds, focus music, and other audio content. The party trick of this section was the exposed quick-filter component, where users could simply tap on the problem they wanted to address and browse through filtered category items – a neat way to simply ‘jump in’ while also leaving room to explore. Each of the category would also have it’s own unique functionality attached – the coaching section would have a daily coaching session row for bite-sized daily pick-me-up sessions, sounds would have ‘recent sounds’ right up top to allow users to quickly jump back in, and meditations would have breathing exercises as their featured functionality.
'For you' functionality
▲ 28% - 33%
▲ 48.2%
'For you' functionality hasn't been out for a long time (at the time of writing), already started raking in 6% to 7% trial-to-paid conversion. For such a fresh release the metrics are pretty good. As of this moment the staying factor of this rise are still being observed. User engagement also rose by 4% at the week it was released.
The onboarding flow also got a major update. We were able to trim down the excess of unnecessary steps 20% making the time to complete the questionnaire way shorter. The impact of the updated experience led to users trusting the product enough to convert even during the initial onboarding.
Updated onboarding
▲ 32%
25%
Onboarding trial-to-paid portion grew after the facelift as well. Grew 7% at first, closed in at almost 9% as time went on. User activation aspect also increased roughly by 6%.
We completed the full facelift in record time: 4-5 months. That’s an incredible feat considering we started from scratch, and could barely lean into data and user feedback since there simply was very little to go by. Now, once the facelift is was finished – and even throughout the process – we finally had accumulated data on Looker as well as user feedback pouring in.
With that we begin the next phase – polishing. Starting out with programs, the difference is definitely noticeable and more reminiscent of what a content-based app should look like. While we did save time and development efforts during the facelift phase, this is where we would catch up and fix ALL the usability issues that we couldn’t get to earlier. Another initiative that took place in parallel was to round up all the variables and building blocks, and have conscious re-usability play a hard hand in this next phase. Just to ease developers from creating new elements per feature. It was unclear at first due to the structure that the app had at first, but again – this is where we make it right. This is where the entire redesign is finished.
This is also the time in development where we pump the breaks a little bit and really think about the user from a usability/delight perspective. How to make the most pleasurable as well as effective experience possible in order to retain them, offer better engagement, and activation. My motto remains as firm as ever – the product must feel good to use, as well as look good while using it. There’s simply no other way around it. To me this is the highest quality app that you can have – one that has a strong desirability factor, as well as great UX to boot. In my mind, these two principles cannot exist separately.
Evolution of the programs screen
The Greatness app has a bright future ahead if the current momentum is maintained. Engagement is way above average for such a young product – and users are vocal with their feedback, which gives us ease and tremendous insights on how to shape our product to be the best and truly one of a kind.
The team aspect @Greatness is unmatched. Each and every one of our crew is driven and willing to go the extra mile to simply make things work. It’s very fun to work in such an environment where you know you won’t be left in the dark, or otherwise completely alone, with a problem that needs solving. A team spirit that’s truly to be envious of – and one I wish everyone get to experience at least a few time in their career.
