Evolving Noom's Coaching Experience

Audience Understanding & Segmentation

UX/UI research, models and CX mapping to shape product strategy

Ongoing insight models

JTBD models and CX mapping to shape product strategy

Concept development, experimentation & testing

Coaching shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all, but how should it work in a world where an array of needs can be served by human and non-human coaches alike?

The Challenge

The coaching component of Noom was brilliant for a subset of users, but the one-size fits all experience wasn’t working for many. There was a disconnect between how the feature was set up, and what many users actually wanted, resulting in low uptake for large swathes of users and a feature that was doing the opposite of driving revenue.

Noom engaged us on an ambitious project to figure out the misalignment between the current cultural perceptions of coaching, evolving consumer expectations, and the way the program’s current structure was meeting these needs.

The Approach

To understand the “why”, we dove into the modern cultural context of coaching, we paired multiple research methodologies, speaking with hundreds of consumers and dozens and dozens of coaches, trainers, gurus, experts, psychologists, therapists and more - to understand the parameters of how helpful relationships formed, from both sides.

From these we developed a tensions framework validated at scale that would then highlight the various friction points we could design better solutions for.

14 key tensions were developed, ranging from user’s expectations prior to working with a coach, all the way through to the on-going, working relationship they have. For example, there is a massive mismatch in expectations between the coach and the coachee before they ever meet.

These insights were foundational in helping Noom understand the challenges in the current coaching program, and gave us the opportunity to start experimenting with different approaches for different types of users.

As more experiments were launched, detailed user journeys and personas were built to understand the holistic experience and the collective impact the experiments were having.

This led to a set of experiments and an ongoing iteration program… that still continues to this day!

Pain points and opportunity areas identified in the journeys acted as the basis for brainstorming sessions on how to further explore and experiment on the product and service.

We were able to pinpoint risky areas where the program was losing people that needed focus, and opportunities ripe with low hanging fruit to drive up stickiness and engagement.

Subsequently, we helped the Noom team explore and pilot range of premium service options and products, aimed at creating upsell pathways from the standard experience for those looking for a more personal touch.

The Result

As a result of the deep dive into the cultural context of coaching, and the on-going user insights into the impact of experiments, the coaching product has evolved into a multi-tier, ROI positive offering that provides users of different needs a solution that fits.