Rebound Planner is a digital planner that helps patients reach their highest recovery potential. The planners are offered in the format of online coaching lessons or individual coaching sessions, in a subscription-based business model. Currently, the client is offering a general rebound planner series: Before surgery, during rehab, and after medical release, which are for any pediatric surgeries. Yet, the client is planning to release other planners such as total knee and total hip.

Thinkific has limited front end functionality. Thus, we had a hard time making the website visually engaging. There was too much information on the old website, making it hard for us to find a good way to organize all the information. Our client was very engaged in the process, yet this made it difficult for us to follow the plans sometimes.

We simplified the website to four pages and went for a simple, straightforward design. We used a unified color theme to make the design consistent and reorganized the information from the old website making it easier for users to follow. We also created two templates for different products that our client can build based off of.

Since the majority of the users of the website are in the higher age range, we wanted to make the website easy to navigate. Thus, we first came up with a flow with information we wanted to present and then figured out where to put each piece of information. This allowed us to come down to four pages as opposed to nine pages in the original website. After knowing what pages we wanted to have, each of the developers made their iteration of the wireframe. Then, we discussed and compared the wireframes. We made a combined version with features we wanted and disregarded the ones we didn’t want and presented them to the client. However, we didn’t realize there were so many limitations with the Thinkific platform. Thus, although we were able to follow the general format of the wireframes, we wouldn't be able to do a lot of the things we envisioned in that wireframe. As a result, we had to redo a lot of the design using what’s available in the Thinkific platform and showed the new iteration to the client.

The main reason why the client chose to use Thinkific from the first place was because of the backend functionality it has. It provides an easy way for the client to upload courses she made and for her clients to interact with the website. After seeing the limitations in the front end functionalities, we suggested a few other websites such as Wix, and Squarespace which can be linked to her Thinkfic courses on the backend. However, the client turned it down because of the additional costs. The main challenge we faced was being able to find a way to make the website look visually engaging using what we could. Since there is a bit of room we could play around with embedded HTML, CSS code, we ended up using a lot of them. Throughout the process, the client was very engaged. Yet, she also changed her mind quite often, making it hard for us to be on the same page. In order to solve this problem, we used one meeting to make sure we all agreed on the same terminologies and then revisited the timeline.

We presented the website to our client during every meeting and got feedback from her. Sometimes, we also used the client meeting session to brainstorm together so that we could all be on the same page. From the user testing aspect, the client offered us a list of people she wanted us to test with. And the client reached out to them with the scheduling link we had. After all the user testings were done, we organized the notes and created a user testing summary to present to the client. User testing sessions gave us a lot of good feedback, mainly how we could better present and organize the information. For example, many of the users thought it took them too many clicks to get to the desired information. With the feedback in mind, we discussed the changes with the client and had some quick brainstorming sessions to figure out the next steps.

Unlike the previous clients I had, this client is very familiar with the platform we’re using–Thinkific. Thus, introductory tutorials are unnecessary in this case. Most of our training materials were created upon the client’s request. For example, she wanted us to set up the default color scheme for the backend of the site, which was something we were not responsible for, based on the Design Guide but wasn’t sure how to do that. Thus, we set it up for her and created a written guide for that. Other training modules are related to the functionalities of the website. For example, since we had to add in a lot of HTML and CSS code for the Thinkific templates to be more modifiable, we created a guide for our client to teach her how to add in the code and what to add in. Most of the materials were done in a written guide format as we didn’t have to worry about having to train the client. Our client was able to implement the changes as we developed the site by herself using the tutorials we made.