Evie Ring App

Summary

Monvano believes philosophically that women are being underserved by the current US health system. In fact, most health apps and many medical screens were developed using mostly or entirely data from men. To solve this problem, Movano developed the Evie Ring as a health tracking ring and application engineered from the ground up for women’s health.

As the VP of user experience at Movano, my role was twofold. One, to provide the leadership with ongoing design strategy and guidance. Two, personally design or oversee the design of the entire mobile experience with my team of four ux designers, one ux writer, one ux animator, and three researchers.

Goals

Through user interviews and surveys, plus years of experience working on similar products, our team was able to identify a few clear user needs. One, users want a way to track their health and get real feedback on how they are doing. Two, they want guidance on goals and challenges. And three, users want to know that it’s all backed by the latest science.

Through a series of carefully planned strategy meetings with senior leadership, I was able to narrow down Movano’s business to a single clear point: develop a core experience that would drive user retention in a way that other health products struggle with. Competing products in the market see retention drop below 60% after just three months. Our ambitious goal was to improve this rate by double digits.

Process

The team brought together an extraordinary amount of research, both on women’s health and on wearable health products. UX research was conducted with both with ideal potential customers, but also with medical leaders in the women’s health space. The big surprise was that users really want to know if they are doing enough for a given day, rather than a raw number. And users want to see unique insights related to their personal health data.

With these insights, and others, I worked with the Senior VP of Product to distill down these maps into detailed product requirements.

With product details in hand, the formal design process started with information architecture. Each section of the app was outlined, given a priority score, difficulty, and timeline. From there, each section was then systematically wireframed and prototyped. I managed this process by giving daily feedback and direction to the team. I personally contributed designs to the most complex design challenges of each area.,

Once wireframing and prototyping were complete, the wireframes were handed off to visual design. All visual design iterations were overseen and directed by me. Each of these sections was carefully fit together to create a complete and flexible design system.

Collaboration

All along the process of information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, and visual design, I continuously worked with our senior leadership to facilitate their feedback and utilize their expertise. Through this process, I was able to identify multiple challenges, including engineering challenges with the timing of data, the loading of data, and the location of processing. I spent extra time working with our senior engineering team to ensure the designs worked within the engineering limitations, as well as suggesting solutions I’ve used on prior projects with similar challenges.

My product partner, the VP of Product, was embedded within the ongoing design process, which made for a simple flow of feedback and collaboration. We frequently debated the opportunity costs of producing a novel goals system, a menstrual tracking system, and a social community. Ultimately, we agreed that the menstrual tracking system was the right short-term goal, and succeeded in convincing the senior leadership of the same.

Research

My role also oversaw all UX research. I worked directly with my research team to develop longitudinal qualitative and quantitative studies, consisting of both questionnaires and diary studies, for each of our major features. These studies ran for twelve weeks, over three different groups, and required a high degree of polish and excellence as they were the backbone of our FDA submission for approval.

Results

Ultimately, I led Movano through its first commercial release of its first product, the Evie Ring. The longitudinal user research proved that the application was well built and resulted in better user understanding and retention. Our onboarding scored higher than any other wearable, like Fitbit, Google, and Samsung. And our core health metric, the life ring, scored better for user happiness, understanding, and usefulness than base metrics like steps, calories, distance, etc.

The Verge and other tech media agreed, the Evie app was good and easy to use. The Evie Ring and app were recognized with a CES Innovation Award in 2023 and 2024.