Realself allows users to discover the treatments, products, and clinicians that the community of users say live up to the promise of delivering effective cosmetic and wellness results. Realself helps connect users with the information they need to make an informed decision about elective surgery and connects them with qualified doctors.
Realself was seeing a growing trend of users who were browsing and creating content on mobile devices. A significant majority of the reviews and content that was being created came from a small screen experience. This new native experience would primarily provide users with a better content creation experience than the mobile site provided. We wanted to build an experience that allowed users to quickly and seamlessly update their stories and upload media.
We had also observed during customer interviews that users who were in the planning phase cataloged information they found useful into a scrapbook like way. We wanted to provide a auto curated feed in the app where users could get relevant content based on their preferences faster than passively browsing the website. Our goal was to surface the content users were interested in and allow them to catalog that information.
My role as Sr. Mobile Designer on the team was to work with the product team and leadership to conceptualize a native mobile experience. I worked with the product team to create user flows and wireframes in Omnigraffle. We worked together on an early prototype and presented it to the board and got a unanimous thumbs up on the project. We ended up iterating on prototypes and did several rounds of users testing to get feedback. We also had the opportunity to do several quantitative surveys with our target audience and were able to quickly build out a hierarchy of key areas in the application. I did some initial mood boards for the visual design of the app which was eventually handed off to our remote design and development team in Europe.
One initial challenge was that Realself had never built a native experience and we needed to build the team to support the app production. This also included resourcing outside development and design help. Another challenge was that we had very sensitive subject matter and needed to work with Apple smooth out the process to get the app accepted in the app store. We worked with them early and often to ensure we would get the app accepted once it was completed. The third and probably most daunting, but also exciting challenge was that we had a very vocal community which set fairly high expectations. Communicating and testing early and often with our users would prove to be key to the success of the app.
We worked with the Realself community to better understand the user flow and user scenarios. Our user research helped us build out our prototypes which we would test in house and remotely.
Realself had three main personas which we used to help guide the app production. Our main two personas for the app were the pre op user and the post op user. The post op user would be the persona who would be creating the stories and uploading the content. The pre op user would be benefiting from the personalized feed and bookmarking content that was relevant to them.
I did some initial mood boards for the app which helped guide the visual design.
We did several rounds of user testing. Our goal was to get our initial sketches and wireframes tested early and often with our users. We were able to recruit active users for both in-house and remote user testing with Usertesting.com. I worked with the PM to build a script for our testing which would help answer the questions we had.
We also had a good set of active users we could ask questions from a quantitative standpoint as well. We were able to poll existing mobile web users to see what features they engaged with on a regular basis and what they would want to see in a native app.
