Hinge Health is a digital clinic for joint and muscle care. Over the course of 2023, I helped redefine the paradigm by which our members track their progress toward better musculoskeletal health. I designed and rolled it out in three increasingly robust versions, allowing us to test and learn from the initial lightweight MVP and apply those lessons to the subsequent iterations. It's called the Patient-Specific Functional Scale (PSFS).
01. Test and iterate along the way
02. Simplified reporting is a win for everyone
03. Focus on the positive
01. Test and iterate along the way
One big lesson we learned early on was that it didn't make sense to ask a user to confirm that they still want to work on their chosen pain area each time we check in with them (every two weeks). Muscle and joint health is a marathon, not a sprint, and we didn't want to inadvertently encourage people to quickly jump to another area of focus. This led to a change in the UX where we asked members to rate their current ability first, then asked via a dialog if they wanted to change anything or carry on with their existing setup.
02. Simplified reporting is a win for everyone
As a company we had always used in-app surveys to assess a member's functional ability. These can be long (up to 20 questions) and are condition-specific, making them very difficult to scale once we start allowing members to work on multiple conditions at once (e.g.back pain and knee pain). Additionally, because there are so many distinct surveys, most teams are unable to effectively ingest and leverage the data collected.
By contrast, the PSFS is a short, condition-agnostic, clinically validated assessment of function. PSFS asks a member to rate their ability to complete chosen activities (e.g. biking, gardening), as it compares to their ability to perform that activity before their musculoskeletal pain started. Switching to this scale reduced the number of surveys our members had to navigate from a max of 60 (worst case scenario) down to 6, and is giving our retention team quantitative metrics to share back to our users, providing encouragement and driving engagement.
03. Focus on the positive
The PSFS scale is the opposite of a pain scale. We wanted to assess and emphasize function in addition to pain, because it's possible for function to improve while pain fluctuates or remains the same. Pain scores alone may not provide the full picture of a member's improvements with Hinge Health. Going forward, we wanted to anchor our experiences around improving function because improving function can be framed as more of a positive and goal-oriented metric than “reducing pain.”
“Jody exemplifies adaptability and flexibility, seamlessly transitioning between teams and projects while maintaining a positive attitude and consistently delivering outstanding results.” —Garret Miller // Product Design Director, Hinge Health