Redesigning a wellness app that good programs couldn't save
A wellness app had genuinely good content and couldn't get anyone to sign up for it. I led the redesign, owning the research and the direction end to end with two mobile developers and a product owner. Three months after launch it had 100,000 new users, with more than 90% of subscribers still paying.
PROBLEM
The content was solid. That's what made it frustrating.
People who signed up and stuck around got real results. The problem was getting them to sign up at all. Too many were leaving before they ever gave the programs a chance, and the reason wasn't the workouts or the nutrition guidance. It was everything wrapped around them. Navigation was confusing, the structure didn't match how people wanted to use the app day to day, and a good product was buried under a bad first impression.
A refresh wasn't going to fix that. It needed a full reimagining, not a coat of paint.
SOLUTION
Two things made this harder than it looked. The team was small, so every decision had to earn its place rather than getting built just in case. And there was no clear product vision going in. Nobody could hand me a spec. Part of the job was figuring out what the product should become before we could decide how to build it.
I studied the existing app and looked at what competitors did well that this one didn't. But the real turning point was simpler: I asked the users. 22 in-depth interviews and over 400 survey responses, people telling me specifically what wasn't working.
Then came the decision that mattered most. I could have taken that research straight into development. Given what was happening to signups, there was real pressure to move fast. Instead I added two months to keep talking with users before locking anything down. It felt slow at the time. It wasn't. Rushing into the wrong redesign would have cost far more than two extra months of listening.
There was a platform trade-off too. Building for iPhone only would have let us push the experience further on that one device. But the goal was something that worked everywhere, which is harder and slower to get right. We went that way anyway, because a great iPhone app that left everyone else out wasn't the win we were after.
DELIVERY
I recommended a build approach that let the team ship faster going forward, and added a web version to reach people who were never going to find this on their phone.
Navigation got rebuilt from the ground up, since that was the biggest complaint users kept raising. I restructured the nutrition and workout sections, automated analytics that used to require digging, and improved the health tracking connections people relied on. The tone shifted too, more engaging and a bit playful, less like a clinical tool. Onboarding came last, tested in groups until new users could get through without friction.
IMPACT
100,000 new users in three months. That's the headline, but the number that tells you it worked is retention: over 90% of subscribers stayed active, per the owner's analytics. Store ratings climbed and referrals picked up.
The content was already strong, and the two developers turned the redesign into something stable enough to scale. What the redesign changed was whether people could find their way to that content in the first place, and whether the experience made them want to stay.
RETROSPECTIVE
The two extra months of research were the right call and I'd make it again. What I'd change is how I sold it. I framed it as a delay, which put the team on the back foot before we'd even started. It was risk reduction. I should have presented it that way, with a clear list of what we'd learn and by when.
The other thing is the baseline. I can tell you 100,000 people signed up in three months. I can't give you a clean before number for the same period, and that's the first thing I'd set up on a project like this now. A result without a starting point is only half a result.
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