Global Wellness Challenge 2.0

Full Case Study

Users
Cigna Employees, Families & Friends

Platforms
Desktop & Mobile

Year
2022 - 2024

Client
Cigna Employee Engagement

Project Overview

Global Wellness Challenge (GWC) is Cigna’s annual 6-week fitness event, engaging 30,000+ employees and their families each summer. In 2022, I led the redesign of the GWC portal — transforming it into a more intuitive, energizing experience that encourages ongoing engagement and habit-building across both desktop and mobile.

The Problem

GWC’s previous platform had seen success in scale but lacked:

  • A modern UI/UX foundation with clear navigation and intentional content placement

  • Flexibility for user goals and cross-device integration

  • Visual clarity and emotional motivation

As the UI Designer

  • Conducted a design audit of the legacy platform

  • Facilitated user interviews and synthesized insights

  • Designed a fully responsive interface in Figma

  • Collaborated closely with business, engineering, and product to align on tradeoffs and MVP priorities

Solutions & Outcomes

Users felt lost or overwhelmed

Key Design Solutions

Challenges

Design Solutions

Early badge progress was rewarding, but dropped off later

Encouraged new activity types and better badge progress indicators

Pre-launch anxiety from unclear expectations

Added onboarding video and pre-challenge preview mode

Lack of clarity for different user roles

Improved goal setup flow and encouraged device/myCigna integration

Off-season disengagement

Introduced layered tabs, simplified layout, and stronger visual hierarchy

Off-season dashboard access

Outcome

  • A more welcoming and vibrant platform UI that balances fun with functionality

  • Supported over 30,000 users, including 3,500 new sign-ups compared to the previous year

  • Post-MVP features committed for 2024-2025 based on my research, including:

    • Multi-goal tracking

    • Activity likes/comments

    • Badge progress indicators

  • Design handoff included detailed one-pagers and a prototype walkthrough for engineers

Home Dashboard Page Logged Minutes Tab

Home Dashboard Page > Logged Minutes Tab

Progress Page Badge Progress Tab

Progress Page > Badge Progress Tab

Progress Page Goal Progress Tab

Progress Page > Goal Progress Tab

Team Page Points Earned Tab

Team Page > Points Earned Tab

Team Page Team Chat Tab

Team Page > Team Chat Tab

Profile Page

Profile Page

Reflection

GWC 2.0 was my first project as the sole designer embedded within an engineering team — a shift from my previous role collaborating within a larger design team. Leading the redesign independently pushed me to take full ownership of the user experience, advocate for design decisions, and navigate cross-functional collaboration with greater clarity and confidence. It also sharpened my ability to balance user needs with technical constraints and prioritize effectively in a fast-moving environment. Looking ahead, I’d love the opportunity to build on this foundation with deeper usability testing and enhanced progress-tracking features.

"At one point during the GWC 2.0 project, the team found itself a bit stuck on how to move forward. Satoko recognized this gap and took the lead in driving user research to help us refocus. Her initiative gave the team a much clearer sense of direction and helped us make design decisions rooted in actual user needs. It was a pivotal moment that showed her ability to guide the team forward with both empathy and clarity."

— Collaborating Team Member

I’d love to show you more of my potential!