How I collaborated with design and UX to re-concept and redesign a health & fitness tracking platform – in just 6 months.

Opportunity

• UX/Content: deliver content & interactive pieces that worked hand-in-hand with new functional elements for a better overall user experience
• Business & Brand: successfully overhaul and launch a 2.0 release of a program with new integrations for automatic Balance Rewards points earning 
• UX: keep platform users engaged and interested!

The Way Forward

Soon after being hired by Walgreens e-Commerce in 2013, my team and I were handed a big challenge: redesign and rebuild the Balance Rewards loyalty program’s health tracking program, Steps (the brand name’s since changed, as you see in this study of a later rebuild).

October 2013–April 2014: We’d be starting from scratch with many UX and design elements, including a Device & App Gallery that required new API connections on the technical side between Walgreens.com and major apps, like MapMyFitness, and fitness device manufacturers, like Fitbit, and put an added UX load on us. Business was banking big on the idea that users would take advantage of the health tracking to earn points towards Walgreens purchases if it was made automatic.

Looking at the “before” (1.0) and “after” (2.0) dashboard shots of Steps, you can imagine just how much went into this effort.

There was a lot of effort and focus on this project within the Walgreens ecosphere, as well, so the pressure was on to deliver in a very aggressive timeframe. Which I can say confidently that my team did. You can see the 2.0 Steps dashboard had all-new health & fitness data visualization, a mobile version, a Facebook-style activity feed, more intuitive navigation and more.

Through brainstorming sessions we effectively built this thing from the ground up, and I learned very quickly just what blank-page ideation meant.

On the copywriting side, I delivered user-friendly descriptions, promo copy (ads/emails), and interactions – including an instructional “how to connect” concept (pictured) – and also assisted with UX input on the nav, API & account log-in flows, an onboarding overlay… and more I’m probably forgetting. 🙂

Overall, there was lots of room to learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time!