John Brodish

Research, and what it changed

Research is part of how I design, not a phase before it. At Juva that meant a two-week beta whose readout led with what didn’t work; at Orita, a UX audit, a card sort, a competitive teardown, and interviews with colleagues and agency users. The questions are the same on every surface: what the business needs it to do, what the person in front of it needs, and what it has to fit into.

The research program

  1. March 2025The critique that started it“It’s called Lift Calculations, but it’s on the viewer to figure out how we arrived at these.”
  2. Fall 2025The research that grounded the workIn parallel I ran the research that grounded the work: a UX audit, a card sort, a competitive teardown of retention dashboards, and interviews — three colleagues on the customer-facing side, three agency-side users.
  3. February 2026The all-hands retention brainstormI built the board, ran the session, and synthesized about a hundred and fifty stickies into five problem statements for leadership.
  4. What it changedThe explainer layer, and the dashboard's three questionsThe interviews produced plain-language metric definitions and the working principle “one short paragraph or 3 bullets explain the logic, not the code.” The card sort fed the dashboard's split into outcome-focused tabs and the app-revamp brief. The frame for the whole dashboard was three customer questions: Is Orita working? Why? Where is the impact coming from?
Juva session screen twelve seconds into Diaphragmatic Breathing: the camera view with a measurement ring around the user's open-eyed face, the relaxation indicator sitting near Activated, heart rate 92 BPM, breath rate 14 BPM.No clinician in the roomBiofeedback is a proven migraine treatment that barely exists; Juva Health set out to deliver it through a phone. My job for two years was the delivery itself: turning the program our chief medical officer ran, in-person, into an app that carries her judgment. This page walks through the how: the program’s structure, its instruments, its copy, and the one problem I never got to solve.