BackHug
UI/UX Designer → Creative & Marketing Manager
Oct 2020 - Present
I led BackHug’s creative transformation: rebranding the company, redesigning its digital and print assets, and running organic and paid campaigns that grew our audience 200% and doubled conversions, helping the brand expand into the US and partner with elite sports teams such as Chicago Cubs and Texas Rangers.
UI/UX Design
Branding
Website Development
Video Editing
Analytics
I joined BackHug in 2020, a company that excited me because they'd invented a robotic medical device that treats spinal joints. They were a small start-up still in the early growth stages, and as the UI/UX designer, my first and biggest challenge was making people comfortable putting the health of their spine (yes, that very fragile thing) in the hands of a robot (yes, one of those very mechanical and strong things) built by a company that nobody had heard of.
Our main demographic was users over 50, most with mobility issues, which meant the design had to to be intuitive enough so that users could quickly get used to how it all worked, and simple enough in the language to reduce anxiety so that they felt comfortable setting up and receiving their treatment.
This challenge of finding the best way to guide users and help them to trust and to buy into complex technology and science was actually a broader messaging problem that the company hadn't nailed down yet, and wanting to get it right is what eventually pulled me into marketing and brand strategy.
Leading the Rebrand
While working as the UI/UX designer, I started helping with website content and video editing, gradually having more input into how we ought to present ourselves as a brand and communicate with our target audience. We were doing a lot of research into what other companies were doing and it became clear we weren't up to the standard of other health-tech companies like Therabody or Kaia Health.
We started to talk to external branding agencies about rebranding the company. Whilst they prepared their pitches, I played around with my own ideas because I knew that I understood the mission of the company and the target audience better than any of the agencies, and I backed my skills and experience to be able to put together a brand design that was true to us.
I believe that authenticity is the key to having a successful brand that both the team and the audience can get behind and respond to.
I pitched my idea to the CEO, and he got excited by it, which led to me being trusted to lead the rebranding internally.
My fellow designer and I researched how other medical and science related businesses communicated their science in an easy to understand way to their audience. We then created brand guidelines, explainer videos, icon libraries, blog and social graphics and essentially, any and every marketing asset you could think of.
As a small company, our budget was also small, but the CEO wanted to punch above our weight to bring us up to the level of brands like Therabody and Peleton, so the goal was to balance the feeling of being educational and accessabile whilst also looking high-end. This meant using a fairly dark colour palette with sharp accents along with a very minimal logo and sans-seriff font.
We created assets showing how nerve compression occurs, how BackHug's robotic fingers mobilise joints, and how that decompression changes how pain is experienced throughout the entire body.
Visualising how BackHug works, so people can see it and understand it was one of the most crucial assets to get right. We worked with an external filmmaker and CGI artist to render 3D models of BackHug.
The result is great!
Building the Website
With the new branding in place, we started to look at our other assets and how we could quickly bring them up to the same standard. Naturally, we started with the website. Again, we looked at what competitors were doing and got the whole team together to highligh sites they liked and pick out the specific elements they responded to and think about why.
This is one of my favourite parts of being a designer: understanding what people respond to. Once you start to understand the way people think, and have many opinions mapped out in your head, you start to see patterns and it makes it easier to anticipate what will and won't work in a design. Plus, it's fun trying to find the balance between two opposing ideas becuase there's always a perfect point of balance and when you find it…oh boy, does it feel good!
Since we were a new technology, we agreed that we ought to prioritise organising key info into 'nutshells', with the opportunity to dive deeper into the science and technology through secondary pages. We had only three named pages: Home for the overview, How It Works for the science, Customer Stories sorted by benefit, and then my plan was to build a blog and linked landing pages that would grow into a health library which we could link to and from the 'nutshell' pages to allow people to dig deeper, easily, as they wished.
I wrote some draft copy for all the pages and placed it in situ onto a draft website which I had designed in XD, so that when I shared it with the team for feedback, they could see how the text looked visually alongside other content. This is allows people to see how much text certain sections should have and where to focus on impactful statements, etc. I have found that working on copy and design in tandem creates a stronger relationship between the two.
Growing the Audience
Once the brand, video, and website were live, I was promoted to lead all creative and marketing. My goal was not to to purely use marketing channels to sell BackHug but, instead, my primary want was to start building a community around back health where users could share tips on not just how they use BackHug but also general exercises, tips and other methods that they use to keep their back healthy.
I redesigned the top section with carousels showing the product in different settings and accordions explaining cost and features—essentially compressing all crucial info into that critical 25%.
Conversions doubled to 5%, and ad ROI reached 17%.
I kept learning more about Google Tag Manager and Analytics to study user behaviour and user journeys to optimise our future campaigns. It's still hit and miss and a lot of the time, you truly don't know why someone made the decision they did, but it works well enough and delivers consisten results and BackHug has now expanded to the US and is now used by elite sports teams like the Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers, and Utah Jazz, as well as wellness brands like Upgrade Labs and Hilton Spa as well as being featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, New York Post and BBC.