MetaLab has worked on many health apps over the years. Chances are, you’ve probably even used one of them.

There’s Ro, an app that creates personalised health journeys. Summit Health, which makes sure patients get the care that they need across America. And most recently there’s Tally Health, an app that helps you age healthier and live longer. 

In many ways, designing a health app is like designing any other app. We use the same best practices, the same strategy frameworks, the same engagement loops, the same hook models, and so on. 

But those will only get you so far, because in other ways health products are very different, and surprisingly hard to get right. 

Why is it so hard?

Well, beyond the obvious red tape and legacy tech stacks, I think it’s because of people like this.

That’s my father-in-law. He’s a doctor. An OBGYN to be exact. People come to him because they need help with one of the most important things in their life — creating a family. 

He keeps his patients accountable, helps them make progress, and sees them through the toughest challenges on their journey. 

He understands them. Not just their bodies, but also how they think, and how they can sometimes fool themselves into thinking. And he knows how to keep them motivated.

His patients love him. 

And that’s hard to recreate in a digital experience. 

Many healthcare products try to replicate the experience of seeing a great doctor, but a lot of them fall short. 

Some are too clinical, giving users advice that goes over their heads. Others are too fluffy, giving only vague and superficial advice. Directions are often unrealistic or scarily insurmountable, and without a real person on the other end of the line, there's nothing there to actually keep you re-engaged, besides some measly notifications. 

Ironically, what’s missing from the products that are most centred on what makes us human … is them feeling human. 

So the question we asked ourselves is, how do we fix this? 

How do we make health care products more human — and, by extension, make us healthier?

How do you build a better health app? 

At MetaLab, we've shaped 5 guiding principles to make our health products more human.

🧬 Grounded in science 

People’s health is not something to take lightly. Just as you’d expect to see your doctor’s Ph.D. certificate hanging on their wall, a health app needs to have a through-line back to the science of what’s shown. Otherwise, it will feel fluffy and not trustworthy.

🙌 Accessible 

Information (and the experience as a whole) has to be grounded in science, but recommendations and results must be delivered in a way your audience will understand. If your users have to turn to Google for clarity on something presented in your app, you’ve failed. 

🥳 Actionable

It’s not enough for a product to give you information and make recommendations on what you could do. To improve your health, products have to make you commit to taking action. Then turn that action into habit. 

😎 Personal

We’re not talking about basic personalization here. Healthcare products need a holistic understanding of who you are, your biological makeup, your lifestyle, and what you can realistically commit to. You know, the stuff your doctor inherently knows about you. 

⌛ Timely 

A lot of healthcare is about waiting. Waiting for results or waiting for progress. Healthcare products have to solve this — so that there are periods of engagement to help you see progress, even if you're waiting.

So, that’s the theoretical framework. But what does it look like in action?

Let’s take a look at three of MetaLab’s projects to illustrate how these principles bend and flex depending on the type of product your building.

Helping patients reach their health goals with Ro

Ro provides personalised, discrete end-to-end care for conditions such as sexual health, fertility, skincare, weight management and more. They asked MetaLab to define the strategy for their brand, website, and mobile app taking a patient-centric approach. 

Accessible and personal are baked into the brand pillars — guiding how Ro shows up visually and verbally in the world.

Every touchpoint feels personal to every patient — beginning with a quiz that helps Ro learn about the patients health goals rather than solely focusing on their symptoms. The imagery and language used creates an accessible and inclusive environment. 

To help guide users to the care and information they need, 90% of the experience is designed to be purely functional. The remaining 10% uses colour gradients to add energy where patients need to take action.

To help patients make informed decisions, Ro surfaces the most essential and contextually relevant information such as common questions about their treatment or explanations of the science behind the ingredients in their prescriptions. 

Timely check-ins at key milestone moments for all plans allow patients to track their progress over time and surface possible side effects. 

Matching millions to the right care with Summit Health 

Summit Health is the leading urgent care provider in the New York metro area. In 2020, they approached MetaLab to create a first of its kind multi-specialty care experience — combining primary, secondary, and urgent care under one platform. 

Built with physicians and medical staff — we worked closely with internal physicians and staff to understand the pain points they experience, and insights they have working with patients on a day to day basis that we could build into the application. This helped us better understand the sensitivities that exist when consumers interpret health data. 

To comply with regulations, Summit must alert patients as soon as results are ready — hitting our timely principle. However, we found this to cause alarm for some users around abnormal or negative test results. 

While the science may find something abnormal, this can be okay in the context of the patient's overall health. Visual language was added notifying patients to not be alarmed and to wait for a doctor to review their results. Once a doctor takes a look, they can add notes with their interpretation of the results — written in accessible, and easy to understand language. 

To enable quick action, Summit has a preferred pharmacy integration that allows patients to send prescriptions to their local pharmacy. This makes the experience feel personal as it’s designed for ease and comfort of each user.

Helping people live better and age healthier with Tally Health

MetaLab just helped with the product strategy, research, design, and build of Tally Health’s member experience. 

Tally is designed to take years of research on ageing and longevity and transform it into an experience that helps users turn this scientific theory into practice, creating the sustainable long-term change to lower their biological age, also known as TallyAge.

Every aspect of the app is grounded in the science of longevity, but the language used in the experience is simple and easy to understand — making it accessible for the everyday user. A good example of this are the lifestyle recommendations. Clear language is used, like “lower your red meat intake.” For some, that’s enough context to get started. For those who want to learn more about the why, they can read the linked research and articles on the topic. 

The action plans provided are extremely personal. Not only are they based on your DNA (how much more personal can you get than that) but also your lifestyle. Recommendations are prioritised based on what will make the biggest impact on their age. There’s a key moment of commitment where members take control of their plan by committing to an action plan that matches the level of intensity they can realistically commit to. 

When it comes to timeliness, members test to check their TallyAge every 3 months. That’s enough time to work to make a measurable change but a lot of waiting. To ensure members don’t feel like they’re on their own, Tally will keep users engaged by encouraging regular check-ins.

As you can see, most of the time these principles are used together and can play off each other. They can mean different things based on the needs of the business and the user but are always relevant.

The result: better health products and happier patients. 

Sean Lynch is the head of product at MetaLab. This post is based on his talk at SXSW in March 2023.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

‍

When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.