Intro

For the last 8 years I’ve been the product lead for Nudge, seeing our company through many different pivots and iterations. Throughout that time it has been my role to shepherd a vision for our product that best reflects the goals of our stakeholders and customers. My process always starts with listening, then mocking up and presenting, and finally seeing the concept through the development process. Due to our small size I often find myself jumping into development to help things come together.

Today Nudge is a platform that empowers coaches, consultants, influencers, and organizations that want to launch an online coaching program with the ability to create their own app without hiring developers or spending tons of money. This is a far stretch from where we started; the “klout for healthy living” - Tech Crunch

Program Update

While some core elements of the original vision remain, such as the ability to sync with most any health tracking device, the current vision of the product is radically different. Ever since we shifted to target coaching professionals around 2013 we had received steady feedback that the habit tracking side of our product fell short in one major way. It wasn’t dynamic enough. It only let you create a static list of trackers that the client was presented with everyday. We found through our research that some things should be tracked less frequently than others, real coaching programs often include a different focus week-to-week, and ultimately seeing the same thing everyday just wasn’t all that engaging.

From this feedback ultimately the card concept was born. Cards would be small bite-sized elements of a program rich with images and text that could live in a feed. The feed would provide a means to always push something fresh into the client’s experience while also creating a way to scroll back and see what you had done in the past. I presented the earliest form of this concept back in 2017 but ultimately we didn’t get the opportunity to execute on it until 2020. I’m happy to say the shift was ultimately a great success and has been key to our growth in the last year.

Planning & Presenting

One of the biggest challenges to this update was the migration. I had to think through how a single customizable screen could translate into a feed of cards. While we did our best to communicate the changes prior to launch I still had to ensure the translation would make sense to both our customer and their clients even if they didn’t see it coming. This migration guide I put together was key in making it easier for our sales people to communicate the changes and our customers to prepare.

At Nudge it has generally been my responsibility to communicate our design direction and long-term product vision. Pre-covid we had yearly retreats where I would make presentations highlighting our focus as a product team for the next year. in 2018 I gave a presentation where I first unveiled the card concept. At the time it was simply a way to solve the problem of dynamic programs. It is also where I honed in our key design principles.

Prototyping

The ideas that I’m most interested in developing are generally too complex and experiential in nature for static mockups. I’m far more interested in how something works than how it looks anyway. Prototyping is one of my absolute favorite things to do. Here is just one example where I was experimenting with an early version of the card designer. It was in this stage that the “design your own app” concept was really taking flight.

V4 Update

V4, the 4th major version of Nudge, was a massive overhaul of our client app. On the one hand it was a move from Cordova to React Native, but more importantly it was where we formalized our commitment to the importance of personal connection in successful coaching. At a time where most competitors were looking to AIs and algorithms, we proudly asserted our dependence on real human coaches and their creativity. During this time I would often say “our coaches already know how to motivate their clients, our job is to amplify their voice.”

Focusing on our customers’ ability to “shape the motivational environment” was a natural move for our product. Through regularly meeting with our customers as part of our white-labeling process I came to see them as fellow creatives. In light of this it became paramount that our design language be as neutral and modern as possible so that their voice and personality could be communicated most clearly.

Promotional Videos

I wear many, many hats at Nudge. I suppose this is typical of a startup but I can sincerely say that it’s drawn from every nook and cranny of my past experience. A great example of this is some of the promotional videos I created in After Effects.