VELLA

Aug 28

VELLA, 2022 to 2023

VELLA told you who you were, then told you what to do about it. I wrote the second part.

VELLA was a wellness app built on the Big Five personality traits. You took an assessment, and the app used your scores to recommend things to do, places to go, and goals to work toward. It also provided fun insights, like celebrity profiles to compare yourself to. I was the Head of Content, which in a startup that small meant I wrote everything.

The hard part was never the psychology (which, to be clear, I left to the actual psychologists). It’s that a personality result is a number, and nobody wants to read raw data about themselves. Every piece of content had to read like it came from a friend. So the daily activities are each written against a specific trait without ever naming it, the place write-ups tell you why this trailhead and not that one, and the celebrity profiles examine Anthony Bourdain and The Dude, because the fastest way to explain openness to somebody is to point at a person who has a lot of it.

The app didn’t last – it shut down in 2023 as the business pivoted – but it was a lot of fun to build.

Copywriter and Head of Content: Jack Lyons

Celebrity Profiles

Big Five reads on people you already have opinions about, scored against your own results. The brief was to make a personality framework feel like gossip.