Total Brain

In December 2017, I received a call from my good old friend Louis Gagnon. He got a job offer for me that I couldn’t refuse. Before this hard-working French Canadian guy went on to report to Jeff Bezos, we used to work at the same company but on different continents. He appreciated enormously my work leading the European design team based in Prague. When he became the global VP of Product and Innovation, he relocated me to Boston and promoted me as global UX Director. Our collaboration had a happy ending, with a Webby Award and all. Eventually, we took different professional paths but always wanted to work together again. Ten years later, that opportunity presented itself when Louis became CEO of Total Brain, a company devoted to mental health – one of his lifelong passions. By then, my kid had recovered entirely from autism. It was about time for me to pay forward.

A few months earlier, Louis joined forces with Dr. Evian Gordon, MD, Ph.D. – a leading neuroscientist who had already invested 18 years and $60M building the largest standardized brain database in the world –with 600,000 registered users– and an app called MyBrainSolutions capable of screening for seven mental health conditions. 

When I joined Total Brain, Louis and Evian had already assembled an engineering team in San Francisco ready to materialize their vision. Their ambitious goal of destigmatizing mental health included the complete redesign of MyBrainSolutions. The plan was to provide users with the most comprehensive and easiest-to-use brain assessment in the market. In addition, users would have access to a wide variety of exercises to improve twelve specific brain capacities. Large organizations would subsidize the price of Total Brain subscription for their employees, and their executives would have an anonymized brain profile of their employee base. And that would solve a myriad of practical questions flooding HR departments like How the company is dealing with anxiety? What about the stress associated with Covid-19? Are men in our organization more prone to depression than women? Or is it the other way around? What is the productivity cost of not investing in the mental health of your own employees? What can be done to alleviate the situation?

MyBrainSolutions, the existing app created by Dr. Evian Gordon, was as far away from my design values as it could get. The thoughtfulness that users would expect from a neuroscience app was missing. The design craftsmanship was minimal. As a result, the hope of getting emotionally attached to its cause vanished very quickly. And I really wanted users to feel connected to Total Brain, its product, its brand, and its mission to destigmatize mental health.  It would have been ideal for me to start the design process from scratch, but impractical since the app was already providing service to a number of companies. So –while building from ground zero the interaction design and research competencies of the team– I set out to revamp the platform’s design language. 

In search of the soul of the Total Brain experience, I made the decision to use turquoise as its signature brand color. I wanted to signal the positivity and boldness of its mission but also to make its brand identity unique in the competitive landscape. TB logotype was shaped after the lobes of the human brain, using Artegra in all-caps to express Total Brain’s solid foundation on neuroscience. The identity of Brain Resource (TB parent company) was also refreshed, using the same intense and vivid color palette as a way to link them together. 

Daniel T., the Head of Product, spearheaded the agile planning of the MVP –minimum viable product– with the purpose of shipping just enough features to collect feedback for future iterations. Design, dev, and product aligned on revamping first the brain assessment results. The goal was to provide the user with percentile scores for their twelve most critical brain capacities instead of the preexisting 1 to 10 scores. Possibly everyone’s favorite feature in the backlog, the personalized program based on the user’s unique profile (aka, “the feed”), was momentarily left on the back burner.

Using Lean UX principles, the team was able to quickly iterate in two-week sprints and eventually launch the rebranded experience of the app in six months. The responsive web experience promptly followed.  Nine months into the process, the new brain results experience was deployed. Additionally, the corporate website was also rebranded. Last but not least, the first batch of redesigned practices ( breathing techniques, meditations, memory exercises, etc. ) was released. 

No start-up can’t afford to guess the underserved needs of their target customers. It took us two attempts to build a successful profile of our personas. Still, the effort of interviewing 36 individuals and synthesizing their expectations, needs, and attitudes towards mental health proved invaluable. To my surprise, Samuel and Marisa –the two fictitious names that everyone ended up referencing in any product-related conversation– gravitated towards each one of our two primary value propositions. Marissa’s interest was self-care solutions for short-term relief (e.g., a breathing exercise to alleviate stress).

On the other hand, Samuel’s focus was long-term self-monitoring: understanding his brain (strengths and weaknesses), its evolution over time, and potential mental health conditions. Three years later, Jackie Ansell –the UX strategist/research leading this study– and I were invited to speak at StartupGrind about this initiative. The audience was quite impressed to learn that all the quantitative information from our BI team confirmed every behavioral trait that defined those two personas. By then, it had already informed a myriad of product decisions.  

The MVP revealed significant issues impacting the conversion flows negatively. In particular, first-time visitors coming from the assessment results didn’t engage in our practices/exercises as expected. The product and design team then focused their attention on fixing three critical aspects of the experience: 

1. Improving the quality of the brain assessment results, making them more actionable and easier to understand. This issue called for the use of advanced –but intuitive– data visualizations.
2. A new onboarding flow that would help users understand the breadth of the platform and make the most out of it. 
3. A personalized exercise program based on the user’s results –a long due overhaul of the so-called journeys. 

As a result of this, the entire information architecture of the platform was re-conceptualized. This project –codenamed Odysseus– impacted only our entire organization and –for the first time– IBM, who was interested in embedding some of our new flows /data visualizations into GRIT, their custom-made solution to help US veterans make the transition to civilian life.

The new data visualizations representing the x-ray picture of a user’s brain capacities ended up being deployed into GRIT and serving 19 million veterans. It was the culmination of a gratifying –but arduous– iterative 18-month design process. User satisfaction scores after the release were highly positive, but we already knew we were on the right path. Our rapid prototyping tests with samples of 15-30 users hinted that the new radial chart designed by Tien Bach was likely going to score a home run. 

Louis’ initial vision was terrific, inspiring, and empowering. Its realization took place at a steady pace. In 2020, the algorithmic home feed displaying mental health activities based on the user’s unique brain profile saw the light. In 2021, we introduced Heart Rate Variability Measurements inside a breathing exercise called Resonant Breathing. HRV is a clinically-validated measurement of stress –which has a massive impact on mental health. Unlike heart rate, which focuses on measuring the average beats per minute, HRV measures the specific variation in time between successive heartbeats. Higher heart rate variability is associated with low stress and better wellness. Conversely, stress is strongly related to lower variability in the length of beat-to-beat intervals. Using the phone’s camera flash pointing at the blood vessels in the user’s fingertip, we were able to prove to the user how effective a specific relaxation technique was in reducing stress in the moment.

Using Lean UX principles, the team was able to quickly iterate in two-week sprints and eventually launch the rebranded experience of the app in six months. The responsive web experience promptly followed.  Nine months into the process, the new brain results experience was deployed. Additionally, the corporate website was also rebranded, and the first batch of redesigned practices ( breathing techniques, meditations, memory exercises, etc. ) was released slowly but steadily. 

Using Lean UX principles, the team was able to quickly iterate in two-week sprints and eventually launch the rebranded experience of the app in six months. The responsive web experience quickly followed.  Nine months into the process, the new brain results experience was deployed. Additionally, the corporate website was also rebranded, and the first batch of redesigned practices ( breathing techniques, meditations, memory exercises, etc. ) was released slowly but steadily. 

By Feb 2020, marking the two-year milestone into my role, it was crystal clear that we needed to start implementing a design system as the team and our platform grew in size. It was critical to optimize our overall efficiency, guarantee visual consistency, and streamline the design implementation. 

My primary role as a “chief instigator officer” of this initiative was getting everyone on board. Making Synapse –as we ended up calling it– a company-wide, bottom-up initiative involving all the graphic designers in the Marketing team, everyone in the front-end development organization, our content strategist, and everyone else in the product design team. Every component, design pattern, guideline, or specification was carefully crafted and evaluated during our weekly design reviews. It definitely took a village. 

Thanks to the tight collaboration with the head of development, Drew Fattlar, and the enormous contributions of Torii Studios, we were able to build two comprehensive component repositories to serve our React and Reach Native developers. With its stage and production environments, Neuron Next replicated every single design component in Synapse and allowed everyone to interact with its methods and properties. 

I feel enormously proud of the platform that we have built. We dared mighty things… and we delivered. But as we say when creating design systems, how we build things is as equally important as what we build. With everyone’s commitment, we built not only a product but a diverse and inclusive environment for everyone to grow. We poured our hearts and souls into what we did, yes, but –most importantly– we did it helping others along the way, mentoring, assisting, supporting everyone around us. As a result, we all felt valued members of a winning team embarked on an inspired mission. And that’s what really made a difference.