The Challenge

I know these tools work, I’ve seen the research that proves it —
but how can we improve the experience of using them?

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Project: Onboarding

How?

To find the answers to the above questions, I conducted semi-structured interviews, think aloud usability tests, and contextual inquiries with active & non-active BrainHQ users, users close family members, and individuals who were entirely unfamiliar with BrainHQ.

Findings ➡️ Design

The findings from these interviews set the foundation for BrainHQ’s new, more welcoming, onboarding process. Through the new onboarding sequence, we targeted dispelling the common misconceptions about brain training and answering the common questions that came up in my research.

From the more observational research methods, I discovered several points of friction along the new user experience when first learning how to use the BrainHQ program, such as uncertainty with next steps and lack of context for how the exercises users were engaging in translated into benefits. We revamped the interaction design for web and mobile navigation, using key elements and incorporating transitions to lead users from one area of the platform to the next. To help bridge the gap between exercises and benefits, we incorporated an additional screen to briefly explain the training benefits and how they apply to daily life.

Project: Progress Tracking

A key element of BrainHQ is the ability to track training progress and performance across different cognitive areas over time. Through my research, I found that a majority of our users were motivated to keep training by tracking their progress relative to their own starting point. To improve this experience, I conducted semi-structured interviews and concept testing.

Some of the concepts we tested with users (click to expand):

Reframing Failure

The concepts incited interesting discussions around how performance metrics can motivate (or demotivate) users, especially when the metrics have a negative valence. BrainHQ exercises are adaptive; the better a user gets at completing exercises, the harder they become, which often increases the chance of “failure” and discouragement. However, maintaining an appropriate level of challenge is key to maximizing the return on these efforts (similar to working out).

• In our case, users seemed to be drawn to tracking their progress from a top-down perspective, starting with their overall progress, and then opting in to see more granular details. Seeing the bigger picture with regard to their progress made them feel more comfortable with having off-days where they didn’t perform as strongly as usual.

• I found that users feared that lower scores could be reflecting that their cognition is declining. In reality, it meant that their cognition was improving and that the exercise difficulty had increased, but we learned that this was not necessarily clear to our users.

It became clear that we had to not only improve the visuals and interactions for progress tracking, but also reframe failure across all performance feedback. We updated BrainHQ’s content and added design elements that ensured that users understood that receiving lower scores on an exercise meant that they were pushing themselves/improving. We also gently introduced the concept of increasing exercise difficulty for newer users.