Wellness Spaces Need to Monetize — But How?

As I mentioned earlier, Wellnest came before CoWello went to market this March. Wellnest was designed & built to act as a wellness space marketplace — think Airbnb for gyms.

The second version of Wellnest — CoWello — was created on the same assumption that wellness spaces needed to monetize their unused rooms & locations, but with a coworking approach instead. We’ll focus on Wellnest to begin with.

Users & Audience

• Space owners who need to monetize their unused space

• Wellness practitioners (personal trainers, massage therapists, physical therapists, etc.) that need to rent space on an hourly or daily basis

Roles & Responsibilities

I was the Lead Product Designer on Wellnest, and continued into CoWello. As the lead on this project, I was responsible for working closely with our Product Owner and Lead Developer to assist with product discovery, write user stories, create user flows, design wireframes, lo-fidelity mock-ups, high-fidelity mock-ups, and oversee a small team of supporting designers to complete our designs.

Scope & Constraints

• Complete an MVP version of a wellness space marketplace

• Development was working with a no-code tool (bubble.io) which put some constraints on design choices

But First…???

Unfortunately, this process was rushed — it was very much a “move fast & break things” approach at the directive of our boss. This meant that essential steps in the beginning stages were either overlooked, rushed, or done retro-actively.

I was given parameters and inspiration, loose user stories and requirements, and was told to design some wireframes to put in front of the boss.

So I Began…

I wrote the user stories and flows to try to make sense of the loose guidelines provided to me.

Once I thought through each flow that needed to be built out, I began mapping and assigned work to myself, our intern, and the secondary product designer so that we could quickly turn out our wireframe and MVP mock-ups.

Fail Fast & Pivot

We were able to create the MVP of Wellnest within a few months — from June to August 2021. We shipped the product and within the first few weeks of having it in the real-world, my boss decided that we needed to pivot.

After there was some retro-active research discovery done, we realized that there wasn’t a big enough market the marketplace aspect of Wellnest. We needed to create a space management system that would then have a marketplace as a feature set instead of it being the main functionality.

With this in mind, and taking everything we learned from this first iteration, we began working on CoWello.

Let’s Go Back to the Beginning

We regrouped, and brainstormed about how we could improve the product to better position ourselves in the market.

CoWello would need to be created for a more broad use — what features were important to us moving forward?

• Create designs for a Space Owner, a Member, and Employees (Staff) user type

• Ability to add forms of payment to be able to send & receive payments

• Space owners can list their locations, rooms, and equipment to be rented by members

• Space owners can invite members & staff

• Space owners can either assign rooms to members or leave them unassigned

• Space owners can create several membership types & assign them to members upon invitation

• All user types can view a calendar with reservations & bookings shown

• Members have the ability to book a room, create appointments, and reserve equipment

• Space owners & staff can manage room & equipment reservations and appointments

• All user types have the ability to cancel or modify the bookings & appointments

• Space owners & staff can view client profiles with upcoming appointments, payment information, and any notes

Move Fast & Break Things, Again

In an effort to get an MVP out of the door quickly, we teamed up with a development shop to start working on things right away. I created wireframes with help from our secondary designers that would be used to help give an idea of just how big the scope was — spoiler alert, it was larger than a typical MVP.

Now Make It Pretty

Once wireframes were approved, I worked with our Brand Designer to get a new identity ready and I created the UI Component Library in Figma — honestly some of the most fun I have is digging into the minuscule details in design libraries.

With the help of our secondary designers, I applied the UI library to our wireframes, refined the screens, and sent them off to dev. Whew! Finally done, right? Wrong — the work is never done!

Moving On

We finally shipped the product in early March 2022 after 10 months of hard work. Now, we employ continuous discovery habits so that the product can get some legs.

I work closely with the Product Owner to refine our Opportunity Solution Tree based on our findings from customer interviews & our own observations, and select opportunities to work into our product roadmap. In the past few months we have implemented improvements to our membership type structure, the user dashboard, and the calendar functionality, just to name a few. We are working on the marketplace aspect of CoWello to bring us back full-circle to Wellnest and we’re already talking about & testing for a pivot that would bring us to a more general market outside of the wellness industry.

As the Lead Product Designer on this project, I have moved into more of an advisory role to our Product Owner & a design managerial role to our secondary designers.

Lessons Learned

I have learned so much from this product. Truly being thrown into a project was the best way to get my feet wet and learn the ropes of creating a company from the ground-up.

I learned where to bend, and where to break when it comes to asks from our Product Owner and developers. Additionally, I’ve gained strong leadership skills that I didn’t have before — leading a team of designers to help achieve our goal was huge for me as I had never had the chance to do this before.

CoWello was a big learning experience for HVL as a whole, and me. I only hope to take all of this new experience & knowledge with me into my next product!