Total Brain

A Noble Cause

In December 2017, I received a call from my good old friend Louis Gagnon. He had a job offer I couldn't refuse. Before this hard-working French Canadian went on to report to Jeff Bezos, we had already worked at the same company but on different continents. He valued my work leading the European design team in Prague, and when he became global VP of Product and Innovation, he relocated me to Boston and promoted me to global UX Director. That collaboration had a happy ending, including a Webby Award. We eventually took different paths, but we always wanted to work together again. Ten years later, the opportunity arrived: Louis had become CEO of Total Brain, a company devoted to mental health, one of his lifelong passions. By then, my child had fully recovered from autism. It was time for me to pay it forward.

A few months earlier, Louis had joined forces with Dr. Evian Gordon, MD, PhD, a leading neuroscientist who had invested 18 years and $60M in 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 to bring their vision to life. Their ambitious goal of destigmatizing mental health included a complete redesign of MyBrainSolutions. The plan was to give users the most comprehensive and easiest-to-use brain assessment on the market, plus a wide variety of exercises to improve twelve specific brain capacities. Large organizations would subsidize Total Brain subscriptions for their employees, and their executives would see an anonymized brain profile of their workforce.

That profile would answer the practical questions flooding HR departments: How is the company 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 employees' mental health, and what can be done about it?

Six Months In: MVP Ready for Testing

MyBrainSolutions, the existing app created by Dr. Evian Gordon, offered valuable science but its poor user experience made it difficult for people to connect with it. With Total Brain, I wanted users to feel genuinely engaged with the product, the brand, and the effort to destigmatize mental health.

Starting the design process from scratch would have been ideal, but impractical: the app was already serving multiple companies. So, while building the team's product design and research competencies from the ground up, I set out to revamp the platform's design language.

In search of the soul of the Total Brain experience, I chose turquoise as its signature brand color to signal the positivity and boldness of its mission and to make the brand identity unique in the competitive landscape. The TB logotype was shaped after the lobes of the human brain, set in all caps Artegra to express Total Brain's solid foundation in neuroscience. We also refreshed the identity of Brain Resource, TB's parent company, using the same intense, vivid palette to link the two together.

Daniel T., the Head of Product, spearheaded agile planning for the MVP, shipping just enough features to gather feedback for future iterations. Design, development, and product were aligned on revamping the brain assessment results first: the goal was percentile scores for the user's 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 (also known as "the feed"), was temporarily left on the back burner.

Using Lean UX principles, the team iterated in two-week sprints and launched the rebranded app experience in six months. The responsive web experience promptly followed. Nine months in, the new brain results experience was deployed, the corporate website was rebranded, and the first batch of redesigned practices (breathing techniques, meditations, memory exercises) was released.

UX Without Research Is Just Guessing

No startup can afford to guess the underserved needs of its target customers. It took us two attempts to build a successful profile of our personas, but 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 everyone ended up referencing in product conversations, gravitated towards our two primary value propositions. Marisa's interest was self-care for short-term relief, like a breathing exercise to alleviate stress. Samuel's focus was long-term self-monitoring: understanding his brain's strengths and weaknesses, its evolution over time, and potential mental health conditions.

Three years later, Jackie Ansell, the UX strategist and researcher who led the study, and I were invited to speak at Startup Grind about this initiative. The audience was impressed to learn that the quantitative data from our BI team confirmed every behavioral trait of those two personas. By then, they had already guided myriad product decisions.

Back to the Drawing Board

The MVP revealed significant issues that hurt our conversion flows. In particular, first-time visitors coming from the assessment results did not engage with our practices and exercises as expected. The product and design team focused on fixing three critical aspects of the experience:

• Brain assessment results that were more actionable and easier to understand, using advanced but intuitive data visualizations.
• A new onboarding flow that helped users understand the breadth of the platform and make the most of it.
• A personalized exercise program based on the user's results, the long-overdue overhaul of the so-called journeys.

As a result, we reconceptualized the platform's entire information architecture. The project, codenamed Odysseus, impacted not only our whole organization but also, for the first time, an external partner: IBM embedded several of our new flows and data visualizations into GRIT, its custom-made solution that helps US veterans transition to civilian life.

The new data visualizations, an X-ray picture of a user's brain capacities, were deployed into GRIT and went on to serve 19 million veterans. It was the culmination of a gratifying but arduous 18-month iterative design process. User satisfaction scores after the release were highly positive, and we saw it coming; rapid prototyping tests with samples of 15 to 30 users had already hinted that the new radial chart designed by Tien Bach would score a home run.

What Data-Driven Design Feels Like

The UX team played an integral role in the organization-wide effort to become a data-driven, lean company. Constantly testing our design assumptions created a team culture of critique and positivity: we didn't design to please a particular executive; we tested to outdo ourselves and to improve people's lives. These are samples of the executive reports we typically presented to the leadership team on Fridays. UserTesting.com videos and verbatims usually supported the reasoning behind each design choice. Most studies involved 15 to 30 participants, but once a year we launched a UX benchmark of the platform with 450 to 500 participants. Every aspect of the experience, including each restorative practice, was evaluated for effectiveness, usefulness, comprehension, and contribution to overall satisfaction. We also measured how new features influenced recommendation intent, brand perception, and likelihood to subscribe, in support of our B2C initiatives.

Accelerating Innovation

Louis's initial vision was terrific, inspiring, and empowering, and its realization advanced at a steady pace. In 2020, we introduced the algorithmic home feed, displaying mental health activities based on each user's unique brain profile. In 2021, we added heart rate variability (HRV) measurements to a breathing exercise called Resonant Breathing. HRV is a clinically validated measure of stress, which has a significant impact on mental health. Unlike heart rate, which averages beats per minute, heart rate variability measures the variation in time between successive heartbeats. Higher variability is usually associated with lower stress and better overall wellness, while stress is strongly linked to lower variability. Using the phone's camera flash pointed at the blood vessels in the user's fingertip, we could show users how effectively a specific relaxation technique reduced their stress in the moment.

Towards Design Maturity

By February 2020, two years into my role, it was crystal clear that the growing scale and complexity of the team and platform demanded a design system. It was critical to optimize efficiency, guarantee visual consistency, and streamline design implementation.

My primary role as "chief instigator officer" of this initiative was to get everyone on board and to make Synapse, as we ended up calling it, a company-wide, bottom-up effort: the graphic designers in Marketing, the entire front-end development organization, our content strategist, and everyone on the product design team. Every component, pattern, guideline, and specification was carefully crafted and evaluated in our weekly design reviews. It took a village.

Thanks to close collaboration with Drew Fattlar, our head of development, and the enormous contributions from Torii Studios, we built two comprehensive component repositories for our React and React Native developers. With its staging and production environments, Neuron Next replicated every design component in Synapse and let everyone interact with its methods and properties.

Conclusion

I'm incredibly proud of the platform we created. We dared to take on something big, and we delivered. In true design-systems fashion, how we build mattered just as much as what we built, and it showed in everything we did. Together, we didn't just ship a product; we built a diverse, inclusive space where people could grow. We poured our hearts into the work and, just as importantly, into each other, mentoring, supporting, and showing up in countless everyday ways. That shared sense of being valued teammates on a winning team with an inspired mission is what truly set this experience apart.