Fysio24

a mobile DIY recovery service

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Project overview

Context

This project started as an idea to improve physiotherapeutic recovery for patients within Dio Design in 2012 and was internally developed on the side until it was officially founded as its own start-up company in late 2015.

Since then, it has received funding from several different investors and participated in the Rockstart's Start-up Incubator program.

The current concept has developed quite strongly from its initial concept and has undergone several pivoting decisions and strategic adaptations until its current form. This start-up experience certainly was an interesting and often challenging context to work in from which I gained an incredible amount of interdisciplinary experience as my responsibilities frequently went beyond mere interaction design during this time.
Team
The Fysio24 team involved way more people over time than I can can summarize here,
so I'll just refer to the main partners here:
- Many members of DIO Design studio incl. myself
- Janno Barlage, CEO & founder of Fysio24
- Jonathan de Roos, as our team's visual designer
- Maxim Dahlmeyer, our copywriter from Tekstgroup
- Marijn Hermans, our external visual designerexternal visual designer
- Various developers from Emendis
contribution

Within this start-up my position and responsibilities and contributions were spread out over a much broader spectrum than in any other project I had worked on before. As the only designer being primarily responsible for the entire product development from its original idea to a interaction concept and its final design delivery, I had many jobs at one.
One side was designing the user experience, service concept and communication materials, while working closely together with our visual designers. Another was collaborating with our copywriters, health experts and other contributors on creating the content framework along with content itself.
Keeping up with our remote developers frequently as well as making sure all other necessities concerning event planning, marketing, pitch presentations were prepared correctly, lastly made me a project manager as well.

My personal focus and contributions covered the following points:
• active ideation, user research and concept development
• user research and persona development
• user experience design from wireframes to beta app + website
• concept design of backend CMS for the platform's content creation
• preparing pitch presentation decks for various target group events
• giving presentations at clients or start-up events
• active project planning with multiple on-/off-site partners
• design of social media content and other communication material
• active guerilla marketing on various occasions

We asked ourselves how physiotherapy treatment could be innovated through mobile technology, design for behavior change and modern content systems...

Fysio24 is our answer.

Recovery can be quite a journey. Looking back, it was a trip for us, too.

Our take on the patient's process of recovery was similar to a journey since its progress usually happens over a longer period of time and reaching a successful outcome often depends on how well people stay on track throughout it.

We found this to be very helpful since following actionable steps with a plan matches a lot with behavioral change theories, which help people to achieve their goals better. Furthermore, a person's recovery becomes more meaningful to themselves which can motivate and improve communication with assisting health experts as well.

Starting with our vision, we built our concept on it step by step.

Creating several iterations of lo-fi prototypes and interaction flows...

... helped to refine our underlying service blueprint along with our persona's customer journey and UX decisions quickly.

During our time in the Rockstart Accelerator, a series of essential strategic decisions made us focus on one specific target user group and their needs only: Runners and their pain

Why runners?

We had to start somewhere and after various experimental concepts within conventional physiotherapy domains which just led to more problems we were not able to tackle within our possible means, runners turned out to be our most suitable target group to engage with for this project.
They are often typically self-driven, frustrated when they are inhibited to be active on track, for example through an injury, and tend to be wanting to do things their own way, which suited our design vision perfectly.

We started focussing almost entirely on the local market to gain traction...

The business potential in this segment is very attractive, compared to more traditional physiotherapy sectors, which is kind of important concerning current and future scalability perspectives.

... designed an entirely new look & feel and revised our content structure...

... and we got creative with the local scenes to cheaply up our public reach.

These steps completely rebooted Fysio24's PR-strategy and brought a lot of new attention and feedback to our brand.

From there on, marketing focussed almost exclusively on social media while our changes in direction could be observed in various aspects such as increased followers, conversations about us on- as well as offline contexts. Most importantly though was that our sign-up rates to our newsletters and our beta-tester list grew substantially in just a very short amount of time.

Infused with new momentum, our product's UX and UI design components evolved greatly during this time.

These achievements were contributed to greatly by our visual designers, Jonathan and Marijn, who both managed to give our vision its fresh feel and who inspired us to go an additional step with each idea by continuously thinking beyond on their own. A lot of cool things were thought up, tested and created together during these often stressful times and long nights. Thanks a lot for your great work and great vibes guys!