Work

Auggi: a gut-health assistant

A 0→1 pilot for a gut-health bio-testing app: a collaboration of er studio, Parsons, Cornell Tech, engineers and students, with hospital and medical-school participants. I was the product manager.

Company
Auggi · er studio
Role
Product manager
Timeline
2020
Platforms
iOS
Type
0→1

TL;DR

Problem
Auggi is a bio-testing app for gut health and one of er studio's 0→1 pilots: a collaboration of university and studio, with Parsons, Cornell Tech, engineers and students, and hospital and medical-school participants.
What I did
I was the product manager. The er studio design team gave an awkward subject a friendly, plain-spoken visual system, carried into the iOS app's screens through the mark and the palette.
Isometric mockup of Auggi app screens on a coral-pink background: onboarding illustrations, a chat-style check-in, a Type Analysis dial, a Correlation Analysis chart and a journey timeline
The Auggi app screens: onboarding, a chat-style check-in, type and correlation analysis, and the journey log. · Source: er studio design team

Context & problem

Auggi is a bio-testing app for gut health, and one of the 0→1 pilots I worked on at er studio, the product studio I co-founded.

It was a collaboration of university and studio: Parsons, Cornell Tech, engineers and students, with hospital and medical-school participants. I was the product manager.

Discovery & insight

The product asks people to do something awkward: log their stool and their symptoms, and keep doing it, because one entry says little about a gut. The barrier is embarrassment and effort more than missing features.

Strategy & bets

The approach was to keep the clinical structure and change the voice. The Bristol stool chart is a widely used clinical scale for stool form; the er studio designers redrew its types as coral illustrations with plain names and short descriptions.

Solution

The visual system gives the app one consistent voice: a mark drawn from a looped gut on a grid of circles, a rounded lowercase wordmark with a redrawn “a”, a palette of black, white, two corals and two blues, and Roboto and Caslon. The app screens use the same mark and palette, from the onboarding to the check-in and the analysis views.

The Auggi mark: a looped gut shape in coral, drawn on a construction grid of circles, with the small mark and 'auggi' wordmark lockup at left
The mark and its construction grid. A looped gut built on a grid of circles. · Source: er studio design team
Auggi style guide: the redrawn letter 'a' for the logo font, the lowercase 'auggi' wordmark on a baseline grid, a palette of black, white, two corals and two blues, the custom alphabet, and Roboto and Caslon type samples
The style guide. A redrawn 'a' for the wordmark, the palette, and the Roboto and Caslon typefaces. · Source: er studio design team
Illustrated Bristol stool chart in coral, each type with a plain name, from 'Rabbit Poo', 'Grapes' and 'Corn cob' to 'Banana', 'Chicken nugget', 'Porridge' and 'Gravy', and a short description
The Bristol stool chart, redrawn. Each type named plainly, from 'Rabbit Poo' to 'Gravy'. · Source: er studio design team

Execution

The app work was for iOS, with the technology from Cornell Tech and the brand and visual system from the er studio design team. My part was the product side of the er studio team.

Validation & results

For a logging app, the signals I judge the design by are whether people finish their first check-in, whether they come back to log again, and whether the analysis views give them a reason to. Those show whether the tone and the system are doing their job.

Reflection

What I take from Auggi: when the subject is awkward, the identity and the language carry as much of the product as the screens do. And with a university, a studio, engineers and students in one project, much of the product manager’s job is keeping every group on one definition of done.