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Case study
Your Path to Wholeness
AdventHealth's Wholeness feature asks patients to reflect on their mind, body, and spirit, and translates those reflections into a personal wellness score. Before the experience could scale, the team needed to know whether patients actually understood what they were being asked, why it mattered, and whether the design choices being made were the right ones. This study evaluated the full onboarding flow, tested two input models head-to-head, and surfaced where the experience was earning trust, and where it was losing it.
tl;dr
- Nearly half of participants (48%) were unsure what the feature was about even after completing onboarding. Purpose clarity is still the biggest barrier to engagement.
- Patients found the flow easy to use, but couldn't articulate why they were using it. Ease of use is no longer the problem. Value discovery is.
- The heart visualization was interpreted as a generic wellness symbol, not a meaningful and trackable personal metric.
- The Wholeness Toolkit had low awareness (only 22% knew it existed), but 75% of those who found it were curious enough to explore. That's a strong signal of untapped value.
- Trust and privacy concerns were consistent blockers. Patients wanted to know who sees this data, how it's used, and whether it connects to their care before they'd commit to regular engagement.
What We Learned
People Didn't Know What Wholeness Was, Even After Onboarding
When participants entered the Wholeness experience, 48% described themselves as unsure of what the feature was about. Only 19% connected it to emotional well-being, and just 14% identified it as a general wellness score. The redesigned onboarding carousel, which was intended to address this exact gap, had not yet made a meaningful difference. Clarity remained the single largest barrier to engagement.
Open comments reinforced what the numbers showed. Participants described finishing onboarding still asking basic questions: what is this for, why am I being asked this, and what does this give me? The problem wasn't unfamiliarity with wellness tracking in general. It was that the feature hadn't yet explained itself in language patients recognized or found meaningful.
Post-onboarding comprehension
What participants thought Wholeness was for
Visual reference
The heart visualization is the central design element of the Wholeness experience — meant to represent a patient's wellness in a way that's intuitive, personal, and evolving. In testing, most participants interpreted it as a generic wellness symbol rather than a personal, trackable metric tied to their inputs.
The Heart Metaphor Wasn't Functioning as a Visual Anchor
In testing, the heart wasn't landing. Most participant responses were neutral, and open comments showed limited recognition of what the heart represented, how it changed, or why its state should matter to them.
Participants defaulted to interpreting the heart as a general wellness symbol, a starting point or decorative indicator, rather than a dynamic metric tied to their specific inputs. Several expressed confusion about what would cause the heart to evolve and whether their answers were actually connected to what they were seeing.
The implication is that the heart metaphor needs explicit teaching, not just visual presence. Patients aren't reading their way through onboarding. They're skimming. A brief explanatory moment, potentially through video, that shows what the heart means, how it grows, and why it matters could close the comprehension gap more effectively than copy-based explanations alone.
Three Patterns That Surfaced Across the Study
The Toolkit Was Invisible, But Compelling Once Found
Only 22% of participants were aware the Wholeness Toolkit existed. But among those who encountered it, 75% said they were curious enough to explore it further. That gap between discovery and interest is significant. The Toolkit has the potential to be the clearest proof of what Wholeness can actually do for patients. It's the moment they see the value firsthand. Right now, most patients never get there.
Reflection and Tracking Divided Participants Along Meaningful Lines
Participants weren't uniformly enthusiastic or uniformly skeptical about wellness tracking. Some saw genuine value in tracking mind-body-spirit data over time, particularly for long-term self-awareness and care conversations. Others preferred objective metrics like steps, heart rate, and sleep, and found subjective emotional or spiritual check-ins either irrelevant or uncomfortable. This isn't a problem to solve with better copy. It suggests Wholeness may need to meet a wider range of users where they actually are, with more than one shape of value.
Trust and Privacy Were Consistent Blockers
Three questions came up repeatedly across participants in different forms: Who sees this? What is it used for? Does my doctor see it? These weren't fringe concerns. They were widespread enough to suppress engagement even among participants who found the concept interesting. Transparent messaging about data use may need to live inside the main flow, not tucked into optional settings or fine print.
Outcome of the Research
The study gave the product team a clear picture of where the Wholeness experience was succeeding and where it needed to change before broader release. The onboarding flow was usable, but not yet meaningful. The heart visualization was present, but not yet understood. And the Toolkit, the feature's most compelling offering, was functionally hidden from the patients who would benefit most from it.
The research pointed toward a set of targeted interventions: strengthening purpose communication throughout the onboarding journey, explicitly teaching the heart metaphor rather than leaving it to inference, surfacing the Toolkit earlier and more prominently, and adding transparent privacy messaging as a first-class part of the flow rather than an afterthought.
Implications
- Lead with value before asking for input. Patients need to understand what Wholeness gives them before they'll invest in answering questions about themselves.
- Teach the heart, don't just show it. The visualization needs an explicit explanation of what it means, how it evolves, and why it matters. Ideally through a brief video moment that patients will actually watch rather than read.
- Surface the Toolkit early and make it unmistakable. It's the clearest proof that the feature delivers something useful. Hiding it leaves the strongest proof of value out of reach.
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Contact
Want to talk through the Wholeness study?
The onboarding gap, the heart metaphor, or the slider-versus-emoji question: happy to get into any of it.