I was hired by the over century old Holland & Barrett to direct Design & Research as the company embarked on its new frontier; into the digital wellness space. My task was to create, from scratch, new avenues of business for the health and wellness powerhouse. This practice would include big ideas, non-starters and some runaway successes. Below I’ll focus on how we created Ivie, the popular at-home testing service which has now been rolled into H&B&Me, another app my team created, which has now been released as a new iteration shown above.

My Role

Head of Design

October 2021 - September 2022

Heading up the Design department in Wellness Futures for Holland & Barrett. Manage a growing team of 10 product designers across multiple areas of the business, focussing on innovation in the Health Tech space, to improve people's lives through better health education, home diagnosis, symptom tracking, communities and much more.

Problem

The mission

Create an innovative new HealthTech product line for Holland & Barrett which addresses public need for affordable and democratised healthcare, whilst playing within the boundaries of ethical medical practises.

Process

Overview

For this groundbreaking work, I was involved in hiring a team from scratch to carry out the necessary research, product design and brand design to get the initial concept off the ground.

Given the short timeframe we had to conceptualise and launch a new product to market (6-months), I hired a known Product Designer in the market on a 6-month contract to come in and hit the ground running. The brand designer and UX Researcher I hired in-house, to also help with the H&B&Me app, something I also led a different team to create from scratch (which has now rebranded to include Ivie Wellness).

Concept

In order to be able to rapidly create a complex product from scratch, I set up feedback loops with the right people, including everyone from other designers, to members of the public, to H&B’s health directors and board members. We met regularly to critique designs, test the infrastructure and modify timelines.

Once the laboratory for the tests was chosen and the app became linked, an internal test with our colleagues rolled out. It was quite a sight seeing people pricking their fingers around the office to test this product for us..

Problems

Obstacles

There were many obstacles in the way to launch this product:

• The laboratory test times were slow. They weren’t used to testing on the scale we wanted

• The technology linking the app, to the lab, to the doctor’s who had to review the tests, existed, but in lego pieces, which had to be solved by design

• There are always scaling issues when you need to use people to manually verify and check anything, but the issues is more severe when it comes to highly trained professionals

• We also had many discussions around the ethical boundaries of marketing to healthy people to test at home

Conclusion

Launch

Product launched on time and is now Holland & Barrett’s most successful at-home test to date. The product launched in over 500+ shops around the UK and has a app store rating of 4.8.