Trust is on the Menu
Redesigned VC Nutrition’s site to reduce decision friction, improve service clarity, and boost user confidence from first scroll to final click. The result: a calm, trustworthy experience that drives 1:1 bookings — in fewer steps and with 3x stronger trust signals.
Category
UX/UI
Brand
VC Nutrition by Maria Higgins
Skills
User Interviews & Insights UX Audit & Usability Heuristics Information Architecture Design System & UI Kit Creation Interactive Prototyping (Figma)
My Role
UX Research (planning & synthesis) IA & Visual Design UI system creation High-fidelity Prototypes
Context
“I feel like I’ve just hodgepodged it together… it doesn’t really flow.” — Maria, founder of VC Nutrition
“It just doesn’t flow.” That’s how Maria Higgins — a functional nutritionist with 8 years of coaching experience — described her site when she reached out. She offered 1-on-1 custom coaching focused on nutrition, performance, and sustainable lifestyle change — but the website didn’t reflect that value, and it failed to convert visitors into clients.
As her main channel for discovery and booking, the site lacked structure, trust signals, and a clear path to action. It didn’t help users understand the offer, feel confident, or know what would happen next.
As a starting point, we mapped the core task flow — from landing to signing up for 1:1 coaching — to anchor the new experience.
Project Goal
Create a focused, friction-free journey that helps visitors understand the offer, feel confident in their choice, and take action — without overwhelm or hesitation.
Problem
For many visitors, VC Nutrition’s website was their first touchpoint with Maria’s work — but it didn’t make that first impression count. Key information was scattered, the service structure felt unclear, and the booking process lacked cohesion. Visitors arrived curious, but left unsure.
We saw an opportunity to turn that hesitation into confidence. By restructuring the content and flow, we aimed to help users instantly understand the value — and act on it without second-guessing.
UX Audit & Market Scan
We began with a landscape analysis of VC Nutrition and 5 competitors to uncover missed trust signals and usability gaps.
→ Most sites built trust by leading with a personal founder story and one clear CTA — guiding us to bring Maria’s story and coaching offer forward early.
→ Complex navigation and vague service descriptions eroded user confidence — showing a need to simplify structure and clarify next steps.
Persona
Based on recurring themes across interviews and survey responses, we created a representative persona to reflect real user needs, habits, and trust blockers.
Insights
We translated what we heard from users into clear design priorities — defining needs, goals, and opportunities for change.
Sophie needs clear, credible nutrition guidance because she often feels overwhelmed by conflicting advice and struggles to apply wellness content to her life in a sustainable way.
Our solution will deliver clear content, tailored coaching, and frictionless access to services for Sophie, so that she can act confidently on her health goals without second-guessing herself.
How might we design a platform for busy users like Sophie so that they build healthy habits with content that is easy to trust, simple to navigate, and grounded in real-life context?
Process
We explored how users engage with wellness content — what earns trust, where they drop off, and what they still need.
To guide our redesign, we ran 5 user interviews and a 40+ response survey.
Across both, clear patterns emerged:
People feel overwhelmed by vague advice, cluttered sites, and conflicting health info
Trust depends on clarity, credentials, and small signs of credibility
Users want recipes, meal plans, and tips tailored to their needs — not generic advice
Visual clarity, filters, and simple navigation help people feel in control
We used these insights to build affinity and empathy maps that shaped our design direction.
Experience Architecture
Simplified structure to support 1:1 coaching — and reduce choice paralysis.
Feature Trade-Offs & Prioritization
Prioritized early trust and cut complexity to stay focused on launch-critical features.
✅
Prioritized
Built-in sign-up form → Reduced friction vs. routing to external platform
Credentials + bio upfront → Early trust signal, supported by user test quote
Free recipes & guides → Matches user expectation from competitors
❌
Deprioritized
Allergy testing, VR cooking, blog post archive → Too niche for MVP, low value-to-effort ratio
Dark mode → Requested once, not critical for wellness goal
Success story library → Valuable, but moved to post-launch backlog
UI Design System
UI system built for clarity, speed, and consistency.
To ensure visual clarity and cohesion across the experience, I led the creation of a unified UI system rooted in simplicity and purpose.
I designed both the style guide (typography, color, imagery) and a flexible component library — including buttons, cards, forms, sliders, and navigation — built from base elements I had refined during earlier explorations. This enabled faster assembly, consistent behavior, and smoother iteration.
Every detail was intentional: I shaped a calm, editorial aesthetic with soft neutrals, clean structure, and deliberate contrast — reinforcing clarity, credibility, and emotional comfort throughout the site.
User Validation
To validate clarity and trust perception in our high-fidelity prototype, we ran a moderated usability session.
Participant feedback revealed:
✅ Strong first impression from visual clarity and real-food imagery: “It’s clean, bold — I get what this is at a glance.”
✅ Immediate access to CTA: user found and used the sign-up form without hesitation: “Ooh, right away! Work with me.”
⚠️ Opportunity: surfaced a need to highlight Maria’s credentials visually: “I'd love to see that like a list or infograph — that would make me feel more confident.”
Early Signals of Success
The redesign is positioned to boost user trust, reduce friction, and increase 1:1 coaching conversions.
Next Steps
As we prepare for launch, we’ve outlined areas for future iteration to deepen engagement and adapt based on real user data and early user feedback:
Expand resource depth — to support different learning preferences and retain diverse user types.
Clarify service positioning — user testing revealed a need to surface credentials more visually and reduce onboarding hesitation.
Strengthen mobile responsiveness — ensuring consistency across devices, especially on long-scroll content.
Personalize user flows — adapting content and touchpoints based on user intent and behavioral patterns.
These priorities will help us move from MVP to sustained growth — and turn initial trust into long-term retention.
