Pinch_marketing

The company: Pinch, Inc.

Co-founded by an ER surgeon and a former SpotHero executive, Pinch was launched in 2022 to empower healthcare professionals to become entrepreneurs, starting with mobile medical spa services. For this niche segment of gig economy medical experts, Pinch provides flexible economic opportunity, working around their availability and location preferences while building deeper personal connections with their clients. Pinch practicioners visit clients to administer botox, facial peels, IV treatments and more all from the comfort of the clients' homes.

My role:

Lead UI Designer, Freelancer

My responsibilities:

Tools:

Adobe IL

Figma

Notion

The project:

I was brought on to the Pinch team–along with a freelance UX designer–as a freelance UI designer immediately following a successful seed funding round to accelerate Pinch's expansion. The company's marketing website, email templates, and client booking funnel all needed a UX/UI facelift to elevate the brand's public perception, and to help increase client traffic into the Pinch booking funnel.

Deliverables:

The team:

Freelance UX designer
Co-founder & CEO
Fractional CMO
VP of Marketing
VP of Technology
Lead engineer

Success metrics:

Improved user engagement
Increased click through rates

Discovery

Through a handful of virtual scoping and requirement-gathering sessions with the Pinch team, we established the goals of the project. We inventoried the existing Pinch website, discussed the vision for the brand and how it could quickly evolve, and established scope for a small set of marketing and transactional email templates. Our timeline was incredibly tight, so the UX designer and I immediately started on rapid wire framing sessions for the marketing site refresh.

Block frames and content block template for Pinch marketing site

Rapid wireframing

The UX designer and I met in person to quickly whiteboard up some wireframes, and moved them into digital formats within Figma in the same day. This wireframe session was meant to prepare us for an in-person working session with the Pinch team in their office the following week. We presented our wires during this working session with the Pinch team, re-solidified our collective goals for the marketing site, and discussed how we'd use the site to tell the compelling story behind the Pinch brand.

Working session with client where we outlined key concepts and sketched quick ideas

Client working session

We presented our wires during this working session with the Pinch team, re-solidified our collective goals for the marketing site, and discussed how we'd use the site to tell the compelling story behind the Pinch brand: a female-backed initiative to empower burnt-out health care professionals to become their own advocates and entrepreneurs. More white boarding sessions happened onsite with the Pinch team, as well as quickly sketching our ideas.

Before and after comparison of the Pinch marketing website design

Before & after: Marketing site redesign

We chose to do away with the existing, brightly colored gradient treatments and custom fonts seen throughout the site to communicate the brand's trustworthy, expert-level, high touch level of personalized and safe medical service.

Before & after comparison of Pinch's email template designs

Before & after: Email templates

To go along with the marketing site updates, Pinch needed to refresh their transactional appointment reminder emails. With mobile-first design and accessibility in mind, each transactional email was redesigned to include clear next steps, directions to the appointment location, and an improved heirarchy of information design.

Booking funnel

I worked closely with the freelance UX designer to create a mobile-first, informative and easy to navigate booking flow. This interface would be used by both nurse practicioners on-site at treatment appointments, and by clients to book their appointment slots ahead of time. This flow needed to feed into Pinch's backend booking system, and it also needed to include a map element so that clients could search for events based on their location.

Design system and navigation lockups for the new Pinch website, as shown in Figma

Examples of digital illustrations created by MC Kaplan for Pinch's new marketing website, including an infographic showing all possible injection sites for face filler and botox treatments

Design system & illustrations

At the conclusion of the project, I delivered a basic design system in Figma that the team could continue to use on digital products as they expanded their brand into new markets. I also worked with the Pinch team to create a set of digital illustrations for each treatment detail page, along with a general infographic about the various types of injections that Pinch practicioners could provide their clients.

Evolve

Success outcomes:

The project goals were to improve client engagement with the Pinch marketing site and to increase click through rates, which we achieved.

Page views of the Pinch site jumped from the tens to close to 1K per month, and time spent on page increased. Out of those visitors, 7.25% clicked through to the booking funnel which was an improvement of 5%! However, once clients reached the funnel about 90% dropped off and less than 1 percent actually booked an appointment.

Ongoing observation and improvements:

Despite increased site traffic and time spent on the site, conversion stayed relatively low at 0.7%. Post-launch, with this opportunity in mind, I met with the UX designer and the CEO to recommend some low effort improvements, including meeting the audience where they are at and leveraging social media to drive traffic directly to the booking funnel.

We also discussed ideas to boost client retention, increase repeat conversions and build provider satisfaction with Pinch. In addition, I recommended an ongoing UX research strategy of regular audience interviews and shadowing, site observation, and implementing a client and provider feedback loop.