My role in designing a popular mobile health app… for cats & dogs.

A look at features we implemented at felmo which increased first-month cohort-retention from 55% to 73% over the course of one year, and increased the second month cohort-retention rate from 42% to 50%.

Elevator-pitch style, what is felmo?

Felmo is a mobile vet, meaning we offer various veterinary services conveniently and stress-free at customers’ homes. With the free native app, you can easily keep track of appointments, medical findings, medications & reminders, while also using it as an educational tool to learn how to best keep your pet healthy in between vet visits.

Background: my role

I began working at felmo as a senior UXUI designer in August 2021, immediately joining the retention team to bring life to the consumer mobile-app. Before I joined, the app was built and designed by an agency that created an MVP using their own library (called UI kitten).

As felmo kept growing, management quickly realised that a mobile app is extremely valuable to the business. Through revenue analytics, we learned that customers who use the app have a much higher lifetime value than customers who don’t.

AKA, a customer who uses the app brings in more revenue (repeat bookings, shop purchases, etc) than someone who just uses our website. This is why my focus is on both bringing website customers into the app, and creating/refining features that increase app stickiness.

About this portfolio/case study

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to include my work at felmo in a portfolio. Creating a classic case study for everything I do, would take decades… plus, I have worked on a lot that I am proud of!

I have decided to show off some of the major features I implemented without going into too much detail, but rather keeping each bit snackable by focusing on the key changes and outcomes.

1. Self checks

Self-check educational flow to boost monthly retention

  • Background: This was the first major feature that I worked on in Autumn 2021. Our goal was to build a retention feature which both gave educational value, and increased appointment bookings.
  • My role: research, product design, art direction, copywriting
  • Problem: Pet owners on average, are not aware that they should be checking their pets themselves at least once a month. By checking eyes, skin, and other body parts regularly, you can catch problems early and increase the chance of successful treatments.
  • Solution: We implemented a flow in which a veterinarian shows you how to check your animal.
    – After completing the check, you are recommended an appointment or phone consultation if you spot something wrong.
    – We send a push-reminder on the first day of the calendar month.
    – Once completing, we ask for feedback: was it helpful or not and any additional feedback or requests.
  • Result: although the adoption rate is not as high as I would like, 97% of users who DO this check rate it as helpful. As well, we get on average 8 additional appointment bookings per week through this feature.

2. Registration flow UI

UI cleanup & UX optimisation of registration flow

  • Problem:
    The problem was that IF the user booked an appointment already on the website (which happened over 75% of the time), we would give them an error once they went through the work of adding their animal, that their account already exists (because we make an account for them) & to go back and sign in. We send them a password via. email and when they complete their booking, but users overlook this most of the time.
  • Solution:
    – The first thing we did is clean up the carousel to reflect current USPs -> AND it is no longer mandatory to go through all screens.
    – We added copy that tells users that we may have already created an account for them.
    – We put the ’email registration’ before the ‘add animal’ so that users don’t spend time adding an animal just to be told their account cant be made (since an account already exists). This is also done to increase registration success rates.
    – Added magic links so that users can log into the accounts we make for them, but without needing to remember the password we generate.
    – Finally, UX microcopy everywhere: used emojis to spark joy, used fun label text (“wuf wuf” instead of “dog”), and better error handling to keep users informed.
  • Result:
  • We aced it bitches