Increasing retention during the launch of a major WW program innovation
👨💻My role:
Lead designer focusing on product and design strategy. Tasks included design direction socialization, product vision, interaction design, prototyping, running design sprints, leading visual/product designers on multiple crews and a close partnership with research teams.
Platforms: Android, iOS, Responsive Web
Tools used: Pencil & paper, Mural, Figma, Dscout, Jira
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Background
Every two years WW reinvents their weight loss program to include the most up to date behavioral and nutritional science. As a business this enables WW to gather learnings and keep what is successful while iterating on areas of opportunity. During “innovation years”, these program innovations are WW’s #1 priority.
PersonalPoints launched globally November 8th, 2021. This story is about the experience I designed to transition current members from the legacy program (MyWW+) to the new PersonalPoints program.
CUSTOMER PROBLEM
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Members don’t love WW changing their programs
Innovating every two years is great for recruitment and generates a ton of buzz in the health and wellness space. However, current members of WW typically aren’t so excited for these program innovations, in fact many members dread this process. Often new program launches result in a spike in cancellations.
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Understanding the problems current members have with WW innovations
The “forced update”
Being forced to transition onto a new program is disruptive in a very real way. Ever crack open your laptop to join a work call and instead of opening zoom you are forced into a systems update? Yeah, turns out no one really likes that.
Empathy and autonomy
Health and wellness is a deeply personal and emotional product space. Having a deep understanding and appreciation for this was critical. We needed to ensure our members felt in control and that their voice were heard throughout this process.
What’s new? What’s not?
With every new program innovation there are a slew of new features to learn. In order for members to get the most of the WW product offering they have to understand what is new, but as we learned along the way they always want to know what remains the same.
NEW PROGRAM TRANSITION ENTRY POINT
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How might we mitigate member disruption?
Solutioning on a spectrum
The explorations were aimed at being conversation starters. These explorations proved to be fundamental in gaining alignment and understanding the dynamics of innovations in other parts of the business.
Giving members options
Upon launch day, members would have a week to opt into the new program at the time thats best for them. Each day of that week we would invite them in with a dissmisable modal. If dismissed we also provided a CTA on the home screen (My Day) incase the member decided they were ready.
NEW PROGRAM ASSESSMENT
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How might we empower members when building their new plan?
Empowering all members
In order for members to have a completely personalized plan they first needed to complete a food and activity assessment. The legacy assessment had some accessibility problems in addition to being presented as very quiz or test-like. My goal was to build a better experience for all members while also giving them a voice and say in their program.
Hearing and
acknowledging
By presenting the assessment in a conversational context we were able to achieve a lot more than before. First, the assessment was far more accessible than previous iterations. Additionally, we were able to reply to members and acknowledge them with encouragement and new features of the PersonalPoints program.
NEW PROGRAM ONBOARDING
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How might we inform and delight members about PersonalPoints?
Leveraging member data to craft a truly unique story
Initially I explored the idea of storytelling with data. Essentially we wanted to highlight new program features like earning points back from activity and eating vegetables. Internally everyone was very excited however we learned this approach was too transactional and even prompted concerns of efficacy for most members.
Tell me whats new and whats not
In testing we learned that in addition to highlighting whats new, showing what’s remaining the same was just as important. This helped ease member’s concerns about the new program and positioned PersonalPoints as livable and familiar. This learning was critical in future testing around program perceptions.
📈 Results:
82% of current members opted into the new program without being “roadblocked”
“New program” and “Don’t understand new program” made up 1% each of all cancelation reasons
Lower than expected new program customer call center surge
