Limbo
Full-time, 2022 – 2023
Role
Head of Design and Product
Tasks
Lead and orchestrate, team building, delegation, creative direction
Team
Designers: Willie Fineberg, Laura Pursell
Product: Orla Caiside, David R
Branding Studios Partners: Tina Smith Design, ZinZin
Photographer: David Chow
A simple system was developed to help people improve energy levels and expedite weight-loss by measuring a person’s biodata. When I joined the company, it was called VIV (Vitals in View). The first order of business was finding a new name with “creative friction” (memorability) and helping rebrand into a premium company. At over $1000 plus subscription fees at the time, the brand and service needed to live up to its price point. After working with ZinZIn, a name branding agency in California, we collectively came to Limbo, inspired by the primary functionality.
The service uses hardware to measure your blood glucose levels, heart rate, sunlight exposure, hours slept and determines how well your metabolism is working. A summary through the app shows you how well your metabolism is working through a chart. An optimal median called the Fastid Zone is where you want your blood glucose levels to stay; it means your body is working optimally and it guarantees weight loss. This zone is what inspired the name, Limbo — you want to be stuck there.
The focus of the company at this stage was primarily in defining the brand, updating the website, and streamlining the customer experience. The UI of the app, therefore, was deprioritized and was left primarily in the “former” brand aesthetic.
While the diagonal is ever-present in the brand, we want to overuse it or it would feel too corporate. So we opted for typographical moments, angling of objects or lighting in photography, and smaller patterned moments tying the logo in to the grid of the layouts.
The stylized, branded photography didn’t show any faces so that the real users and would be the faces of the company.
Website
After changing the name to Limbo, an overhaul of the overall brand began. Coupled with investor pressure for tighter deadlines, we had to create an entirely new website in 3 weeks. Up until this point, incremental content changes to the previous site had not only proven unsuccessful for consumers, but actually began to work against our SEO, making the need for an expedited website even greater.
To make this happen, I delegated several work-streams to coincide: 1) design to own the sitemap and content distribution; 2) marketing to own the content itself based on design’s outline and content population, 3) design to create “families” of CMS modules where layers can be turned on or off for easier customizability, and 4) Anna would own the photoshoot, orchestration, and QA with development.
It was a fast, collaborative project, but it turned out beautifully, and the investors were very happy.
Due to runway, me and my team were later let go. Marketing then owned design and has since changed the look and feel to optimize for non-designer expediency.
The handoffApp
When I first joined, the biggest priority for me was to get an accounts section in app. Prior to joining, there was only a screen with bullet points listing out the hardware instructions. With the addition of the accounts tab, providing real time data about battery life and onboarding, we alleviated a significant number of our tickets.
Because we were seeing a change in the emotional journey of our users as we started to scale up, I put together the standard emotional journey one could expect following the program religiously. In doing so we saw the users who were least happy with the product were the ones who didn’t check the app at least 8x a day. In other words, it failed the “toothbrush test,” or the habit-forming experience we needed. So we created the “Accountability score” where users would get scores based on usage, quality of inputs, and a daily weigh-in which gave our nutrition scientists the information they needed to see how that user’s body was processing sugars.
MVP, launched
Future state, exploration
