Heart disease is the leading cause of death in America, yet 80% of cases are preventable. 23andMe offered resources to help customers manage their heart disease risk, but these features are scattered across the app, making it difficult for users to utilize effectively.
This was an exploration to design a centralized hub for users to gain insights and take actions to minimize their heart disease risk.
PLATFORMS
iOS
MY ROLE
Product strategy
UX
TEAM
Principal Product Designer
OBJECTIVE
The goal was to design a cohesive Heart Hub experience that seamlessly integrated 23andMe's heart-related features, providing users with meaningful context to better manage their heart health. By unifying these resources, the feature would amplify their collective impact—making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Additionally, the feature would highlight the inherent value of 23andMe’s services and drive sustained engagement, encouraging users to return and actively manage their health over time.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
23andMe offers a wealth of resources to help users manage conditions like heart disease, but did not contextualize them in any way making them the insights feel scattered and disconnected. To truly empower users, the experience needed to translate data into actionable, personalized guidance.
GENETIC REPORTS
Coronary Artery Disease, Familial Hypercholesterolemia, High Blood Pressure, Triglycerides, Hereditary Amyloidosis, Atrial Fibrillation, HDL / LDL Cholesterol, Type 2 Diabetes
CLINICIAN CONSULTS
Lemonaid Clinician Consults
BLOOD LABS AND VITALS
LDL / HDL, HbA1c, Triglycerides, Total Cholesterol, Lp(a), ApoB
HealthKit Import (activity, heart rate, etc.), Health Tracks
PAINKILLERS
To better assess the value of the feature I was building, I conducted a Painkiller analysis from Tony Fadell’s book Build. This helped identify the core problems we were solving for our customers and clarified their motivations for using 23andMe. A key takeaway from the exercise was that 23andMe has the potential to expand access to care by lowering barriers to entry by leveraging a customer's full genetic and lifestyle data to deliver personalized health recommendations at the right moment—rather than relying solely on population averages. For example, one of 23andMe’s unique competitive edge lay in its ability to personalize drug dosages based on a user's pharmacogenetic report, tailoring medication recommendations to their unique DNA. This meant treatments could be more precise, effective, and safer, giving users insights beyond what traditional healthcare could offer. It could also help determine whether a preventive statin was recommended for a customer based on their heart disease and diabetes risk, as statins have the potential to increase diabetes risk.
USER JOURNEY
My next step was to map out a User Journey to better understand the emotions, pain points, and frustrations of individuals managing their risks for conditions like cardiovascular disease. I focused on 23andMe’s pharmacogenetics (drug response) reports, as I saw them as a unique competitive advantage over other telehealth services.
Through this process, I realized that 23andMe’s pharmacogenetics reports could eliminate much of the guesswork in prescribing medication dosages, particularly for drugs like statins as the report would help the clinician understand how their body metabolized the drug.
DESIGNS
I began designing screens for the Heart Hub experience, focusing on crafting a seamless and intuitive top-level journey. My goal was to ensure that users could effortlessly navigate their heart health insights while being guided toward actionable, personalized recommendations that made managing their risk factors both engaging and effective.
NEW HEALTH HOME
I reimagined our Health Home screen to create a more intuitive and action-driven experience. The redesigned Health Home tab now prominently features bundled categories of prevalent conditions that customers may want to manage, such as heart health, diabetes, and mental health. Below these bundles, I introduced a "Base Action Plan"—a section highlighting key health metrics that all users should monitor to proactively improve their overall well-being. This page would serve as the jumping off point for all users and would become more personalize as the customer provided us with more health data.
HEART HUB
Once inside the Heart Hub, the app would highlight the top risk factors for cardiovascular disease and offer personalized recommendations on how users could track these key data points through 23andMe’s tools and services. These recommendations would create a seamless, organic pathway for user engagement, encouraging proactive health tracking while also supporting data collection and recurring revenue opportunities.
BUILD YOUR PLAN
Once the user had had the opportunity to review their highest risk factors for heart disease, the app would provide a centralized location where they could purchase 23andMe services that would help them manage their heart disease.
Subscriptions to routine blood screenings and medications would provide an organic source of recurring revenue.
EVOLVING HEALTH HOME
As customers shared more data, 23andMe would continuously refine and deliver personalized health recommendations tailored to their unique profiles. These updates would be seamlessly integrated into their Health Home screen, creating an ongoing engagement and feedback loop that encouraged proactive health management and deeper user interaction.
For example, a customer could be prompted to meet with their clinician regarding their statin based on their pharmacogenetics report and elevated statin levels.
INTEGRATING DRUG RESPONSE
The goal of the Heart Hub was to connect key health insights from the customer’s data, empowering them to make more informed decisions about their well-being. One major opportunity was integrating a user’s pharmacogenetics report with their clinical prescription shopping experience, ensuring they received personalized medication recommendations based on their unique genetic profile.
CONCLUSION
The Heart Hub reimagined how users manager their risk for cardiovascular disease by contextualizing all the services provided by 23andMe into a cohesive and seamless experience. By designing an intuitive Health Home Screen with a foundational action plan that personalized over time based on user engagement, the project empowered users to make informed health decisions while also fostering organic engagement, data collection, and recurring revenue.
These explorations were incorporated by the Product Team into the long term product vision for 23andMe's new Me Dashboard.
