Mobile App Goal-Setting Redesign

As the lead product designer for this project, my pivotal responsibilities included:

• Product Design Leadership
• Usability Testing Facilitation
• Prototyping
• Stakeholder Management
• Wireframing
• Production Asset Design

The Project 

The mobile app redesign was conceived as a strategic experimental platform—a lean, agile environment to test and validate design hypotheses through rapid, focused iterations. Each two to three-week experiment allowed us to:

• Generate quick, actionable insights
• Test design concepts with minimal resource investment
• Create a flexible framework for continuous innovation
• Validate potential solutions before full-scale implementation

By treating the mobile app as a living laboratory, we could:

• Rapidly prototype goal-setting approaches
• Gather real-user feedback quickly
• Iterate design solutions with minimal risk
• Explore innovative user experience concepts

The context 

CoachHub's mobile app faced a critical engagement challenge: while 50% of users downloaded the app, only 10% actively used it. 

The existing mobile app mirrored the web platform's design, creating a user experience that offered no mobile-specific value. Users predominantly preferred the web platform, primarily because coaching sessions occurred in office or home environments.

Business Rationale
The project aimed to transform CoachHub's mobile app from an underutilized tool into a strategic business asset by addressing critical user engagement challenges.

Research and discovery

The research phase involved five cross-functional stakeholder interviews to gain comprehensive insights into the app's challenges. An internal survey revealed critical pain points in goal setting, with users feeling unsupported and forced to use external tracking tools.

By focusing on mobile design, we saw an opportunity to create a user-centric goal-setting solution that could potentially improve the entire platform. The research highlighted three key issues:

• Difficulty defining clear, measurable goals
• Minimal structured goal-setting support
• Disconnection from the coaching experience
• This concise version preserves the core research findings and strategic insights while reducing the overall word count.

 
Design Strategy

Armed with these insights, I facilitated an ideation workshop that transformed research into actionable design principles. We generated four distinct concept approaches, ultimately selecting the most promising solution through collaborative voting. This democratic design process ensured our solution was grounded in collective expertise.

Prototype Development

Our mid-to-high-fidelity prototype emerged from the most compelling concept developed during our ideation workshop. The design addressed key user pain points identified in our research.

Before Redesign:

• No goal creation guidance
• Unclear progress tracking
• Undefined milestone processes
• Disconnected focus areas

After Redesign:

• Push notification reminders
• Guided goal-setting workflow
• Introductory goal-setting screen
  
• Multiple goal creation pathways
• Step-by-step coaching support
  

Rigorous Testing Approach

We conducted 10 internal user tests with the goal of:

• Assess design usability
• Validate core concept
• Identify potential improvements
  

Each test revealed nuanced insights:

• Refined wording for clarity
• Adjusted interaction flows
• Enhanced guidance mechanisms
• Improved overall user comprehension

Final Thoughts

Despite our innovative approach and promising initial results, the project was ultimately de-prioritized due to critical business constraints.

But we gained a lot: