Better employee health by design

Bringing cohesion to Personify Health’s wellness app

Background

Virgin Pulse (now Personify Health) blends software and wearables to improve member wellbeing, but the app experience didn’t match the mission. Navigation was confusing, features felt scattered, and branding was outdated and inconsistent. Teams were UX-driven, but without a central design system, they duplicated efforts in siloes.

Role and contributions

As design manager, I led my team and 3 others in redesigning the Home and Health landing pages, achieving WCAG compliance, and establishing governance guidelines for the company’s first centralized design system.

Approach

01 Strategy

Set the purpose of pages before defining patterns

02 Decisions

Build for modularity, motivation, momentum

03 Impact

Delight for users, speed for teams

Outcomes

↓ duplication

Reduced redundant components

↑ navigation ease

According to user self-report

70%

Reduction in navigation items

01 Strategy

Set page purpose before defining patterns

I led with meaning—not menus—grounding us in real members’ mental models.

Before touching IA, I facilitated cross-functional workshops with 2 teams to align around what mattered most to users. This reframed our approach—from optimizing navigation to designing motivation-driven flows. I partnered with a research lead to run card sorts and tree tests that revealed how users naturally organize information. The app’s architecture evolved to reflect the thinking of real members, not our assumptions.

I built design and development velocity through foundations.

I created a flexible style guide that became the seed for our first company-wide design system—accelerating team output while strengthening product cohesion. I grew my team, hiring a new product designer to use the style guide as inspiration for a more robust and polished design system.

Simultaneously, I led a WCAG compliance initiative to make the web experience both responsive and accessible under a tight deadline. I developed a guide that outlined accessibility standards (zoom, reflow, text resize), identified priority pages, and provided screen size recommendations, annotation examples, and reusable resources. Designers, engineers, and PMs used the guide as a shared reference point, streamlining collaboration and ensuring we hit our deadline.

02 Design decisions

Build for modularity, motivation, momentum

Depth, flexibility, and personalization

I defined the strategy for balancing user goals and business needs (sometimes at odds with one another). My team introduced a modular, adaptive layout system that flexed to individual health journeys and employer objectives, ensuring the experience felt tailored while maintaining consistency across audiences.

Prioritizing points, progress, and pals.

Research revealed that process indicators, social connection, and rewards drove sustained engagement. Teams brought points, streaks, and leaderboards into the core experience, turning abstract motivation into visible, actionable momentum.

03 Impact

Delight for users, speed for teams

“The style is clean. It’s more like other apps I’m used to now.”
“Ooo! I love this. Everything looks so tappable.”

Following the redesign, the majority of surveyed users reported it was easy or very easy to find what they needed, marking a meaningful shift from the app’s previous structure.

Behind the scenes, the new design system cut down on one-off implementations and improved communication across siloed product groups.