Chances are you have tried a health app in a fleeting impulse to build better habits or because you simply value self care.
When it comes to building healthier habits, outside-in solutions that prompt dieting or exercising can only go so far if you ‘re not taking into account your mindset, life and unique biology.
There was one goal for this project — create a lovable MVP for a health app that would help people build healthier habits around their body signals.
I joined the team as the product design and work stream lead and coordinated the end-to-end discovery and delivery process, from problem framing, co-creation, low fidelity prototyping to high fidelity prototyping and handoff.
We wanted to make sure we were de-risking and validating our assumptions around the unmet needs and the experience that could potentially make healthier habits stick. And —we had just a few months to make it happen.
From the get go we defined a discovery and delivery stream, so that we could focus on uncovering insights on the highest risk assumptions, while also feeding the product development with structures we felt confident with.
Creating a curated plan based on people’s progress and patterns was the core of the team’s retention strategy to make sure users stayed engaged.
To build habits that stick and ensure people get value each time they use the app we leaned primarily on Nir Eyal’s Hook Model.
We integrated “power ups” that would ignite that spark effect and help people feel they are actively one step closer towards their goal.
When people feel guilt or patience (identified triggers) of not being productive enough, the action would be to open the app and complete a power up.
The variable reward is in the activity itself and all the uncertainty that comes with the different available power ups. The app recommends power ups based on your progress and goals, and they will be a little bit different every day.
To layout the engagement mechanics, I led a series of iterative co-creation workshops. To improve upon the first iterations, I structured a set of prompts to help the team focus on designing better ways to provide value early on and help people stick to the plans.
More about the process ↓
Getting past copy & stitch design: co-creation tactics
Once people start using the app, the experience mimics the office visits to a health care coach to help them create and stick to the plan that they want — and need. But first, we needed to show the value without asking too much at first and get people psyched early on.
To create a base plan we framed the needs based on the identified Jobs-to-be-Done from user interviews, and combined it with a future-self visualisation to get people invested.
To make sure people did not get overwhelmed along the journey, we designed 4-5 day plans for each stage of the habit formation lifecycle — from kick off, building to mastery.
For each stage, we prompted users to complete an activity before showing them the full plan to leverage the goal-gradient effect.
To account for engagement changes I divided the blueprinting process and targeted beginners, ongoing, disengaged and resurrected users separately.
More about the process ↓
Blueprinting ops, lessons from habit-forming apps
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