During 6 months, I had the opportunity to join Lifesum, the 35+ million users nutrition app as a Product Designer to help people live a better and healthier life around the globe. It uses tech and psychology to create tailored plans for users, to help them live happier, more balanced lives.
Lifesum will show them how changing small habits and implementing them in everyday life can change your life. The Lifesum app allows users to improve the way they eat, drink and exercise, every single day.
Organized in feature team, I’ve led multiple projects from key screens redesigns to growth oriented redesigns. I had to iterate on features quickly, building MVPs with the growth team while getting feedbacks from our users, leading multiple UX workshops with them.
Lifesum is a freemium app, i.e. it offers additional features through monthly in-app purchases (the ‘Premium’ version).
With a premium version, you can unlock special plans with recipes made by in-house nutritionists, and tailored to your program.
You can also unlock more metrics to track your progress. To sum it all, it helps you reach your goal faster by accompanying you. The free version on the other hand allows you to simply track your meals.
There is no plan, no recipe, no advice whatsoever. Just a calorie counter app.
My role as a product designer was to redesign the Premium page which would inform new users about the benefits & value of the Premium version to increase the number of subscriptions and therefore revenue.
We had a conversion rate of around 3% at the time and we needed to improve this number.
Was it because people would not see any value in the Premium version? Was it because they thought it wouldn’t be necessary if everything that they needed was already included in the free plan?
I wanted the users to understand the value of the paid plan and for this I needed to understand what our users wanted. User testing is key here: early on in my involvement, I decided that the current Premium screen (see the screenshot below) would need to be user-tested thoroughly in order to understand why and how people would convert to a premium version of the app.
Below are the previous Premium screens. Notice how the price takes the attention right away. The actual benefit for the user is stuck inside a small circle:
After a round of interviews, it was clear our users would not understand what the premium version of the app had to offer. Even if the free trial is a good thing there is still this psychological barrier where you have to enter your credit card information without really knowing what you’re going to pay for. The main questions I got from our users were :
- What do I get exactly versus the free plan?
- Is it compatible with XXX diet?
- Will it actually help me or is it just marketing?
- What do you have to offer compared to your competitors like MyFitnessPal?
Different personnas emerged from these interviews: I know I would not be able to address every question the same way.
I built personas based on these interviews to understand what would make each of them convert and how this could be translated in the final design. I started sketching / wireframing different blocks in my page. I didn’t want the price to be a barrier. Instead, I wanted our users to first understand the value the premium plan had to offer by making them feel like they are part of a program that’ll help them reach their goal.
Here’s how I did it, for every personna I had identified:
→ After many iterations, we A/B tested on new users the version you’ll see below. It outperformed our expectations by increasing the convertion rate from around 3% to more than 8%!
We decided to roll it out for all our existing users as well and this is still the version in production today.
