PEAK

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Leveraging the Power of Empathy and Human Behavior Models to Design a Habit Forming App that Empowers Real Change

People worldwide set their New Year's resolutions with high hopes of achieving their goals. However, like many, I found it challenging to maintain habits that would lead to lasting change. Driven by a desire to improve my own lifestyle, I embarked on a journey to understand why building and sticking to habits was so challenging. By leveraging the power of empathy and human behavior models, we were able to explore a potential product.

*This case study details my individual project conducted during my UX/UI bootcamp experience at DesignLab

Roles

UX Design

Timeline

6 Weeks

Figma / Illustrator

Tools

  • People struggle to build and stick to habits due to lack of motivation, accountability, and support

  • Existing habit-tracking apps are ineffective with overwhelming and intrusive notifications which leads to user fatigue and user resistance

Problem

Solution

A habit-building app that provides users with a personalized roadmap to achieve their goals through subtle and non-intrusive recommendations and challenges throughout the day based on their preferences, behavior, and location.

Examining the limitations in current habit-tracking apps, why doesn’t it work?

Competitive Analysis

Through competitive analysis we learned that tacking alone isn't enough to build habits. We observed that this was due to habit tracking apps becoming just another habit to track, making it counterintuitive and leading to user disengagement and fatigue. Research has shown that many users find the constant reminders to be annoying and may develop the habit of ignoring them over time.

Understanding the barriers to personal change

USER INTERVIEWS

To understand the motivations, pain points, goals and needs of our user, we conducted interviews with a group of 5 individuals.

Our user interviews revealed some common barriers to building habits, especially in the context of fitness and health.Without the support of a personal trainer, many users felt lost and unsure of how to stay on track.

Given these insights, we decided to focus our MVP on the fitness category, with the goal of creating a habit-forming app that provides users with the accountability, motivation, and support that they’ve been lacking.

Many individuals struggle with staying accountable to their goals, lacking the motivation and discipline to follow through. Additionally, busy schedules and a lack of time often make it difficult to prioritize health and fitness goals.

Key insights from user interviews

  • Lack of Acconutability

    “I found it difficult to hold myself accountable, without someone else to answer to. It's easy to let my routine slip and not make progress towards my goal”

  • Lack of Progress

    “I get discouraged cause I’m not seeing enough progress and I just think ‘What’s the point?’”

  • Lack of Discipline

    "During my busy days, I find it hard to stay disciplined with my goals. I know I want to improve, but I often get sidetracked or forget what I'm working towards.”

  • Lack of Motivation

    “It’s like I’m always finding excuses not to exercise, and it’s frustrating because I know I need to be healthier… but I just don’t have the motivation to go work out.”

  • Lack of Time

    “I work long hours and have a busy schedule, so finding time to exercise is really difficult. By the time I get home, I’m too tired to go to the gym.”

PERSONAS

Meet Brendon

The development of persona was essential for us to gain insights into our target user’s needs, goals, motivations and pain points, ensuring our app is tailored to their specific requirements. By empathizing with our users and aligning our design decisions with their needs, we can create a more engaging and user-centered experience, increasing the likelihood of user adoption and success in building lasting habits.

So, how might we help Brendon stay motivated to build healthy habits?

Building and sticking to habits is a complex process influenced by various factors such as motivation, triggers, rewards, and social dynamics. To address these intricacies, we turned to behavior models as a guiding framework for our app's design. These models provide valuable insights into human behavior and offer strategies to effectively motivate individuals, facilitate behavior change, and foster long-term habit formation.

WHY BEHAVIOR MODELS?

Unleashing the Power of Behavior Models for Lasting Habit Change

FOGG BEHAVIOR MODEL by Dr. BJ Fogg

This model emphasizes the role of motivation and ability in triggering behavior. By aligning our solution’s prompts, actions, and rewards with users' motivation and ability levels, we aim to create an optimal environment for habit formation. Through well-timed and personalized prompts, we can nudge users towards positive actions and reinforce their progress.

HOOK MODEL by Nir Eyal

The Hook Model focuses on creating habit-forming experiences by understanding the psychological triggers and reinforcements that drive user engagement. By designing our app with triggers, actions, variable rewards, and investments, we aim to create an engaging yet positive user experience that encourages consistent engagement and habit development

ATOMIC HABITS by James Clear

This model emphasizes the power of small incremental changes and the compounding effect they have on long-term habit formation. By breaking down goals into manageable sub-goals and providing users with actionable steps, we empower them to make consistent progress and cultivate lasting habits.

Continue reading to see how we incorporate the behavior models into our solution

How we will keep users engaged and coming back

Hook Model by Nir Eyal

We carefully considered each phase of the Hook Model to identify how we could benefit our users and designed our product accordingly. By leveraging personalized real-time challenges, we engage users and tap into their desire to improve, driving them to take action. As users complete challenges and earn rewards, they become invested in their progress, creating a self-reinforcing loop that encourages continued use and habit formation.

Overcoming barriers to behavior change: strategies for lowering resistance

Behavior Model by BJ Fogg

The behavior model is a framework that describes the key factors that influences human behavior. The model proposes that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. The behavior model can be used to explain how users can be triggered to take action in the app.

SUGGESTED STRATEGIES

Harnessing the power of the behavior model, we tailor our app to effectively address the dynamic relationship between motivation, ability, and prompts. This enables us to identify barriers and provide customized strategies to enhance users' capacity and motivation for taking action. Our solution empowers users with personalized interventions, dismantling obstacles and paving the path for successful habit-building.

Leveraging Atomic Habits to Develop Effective Habits Building Journey

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Incorporating the principles of Atomic Habits by James Clear can also enhance the habit-building experience for users. We will build user’s habit building journey based on these principles to provide the most effective results.

The core principles will enabled us to break down goals into small, manageable steps, further enhancing our app's habit-building capabilities.

Personalized habit-building with AI-driven insights, context-aware daily recommendations, and scientifically proven strategies for success

Proposed solution

Customized Habit Roadmaps

Embark on a personalized journey towards your goals with our habit-building roadmaps. Our scientifically proven behavioral model strategies provide the framework for creating effective and sustainable habits.

Seamless Integration

Experience the power of integration as our app seamlessly connects with your daily life. Leveraging AI-driven insights from user data, location services, and other apps, we provide subtle guidance, motivation, and support precisely when and where you need it most.

Tailored Daily Actions

Unlock your full potential with context-aware, bite-sized daily actions designed specifically for you. Our app takes into account your preferences, routine, and goals, ensuring that each action is relevant, achievable, and takes you closer to your desired outcomes.

Storyboard

Visualizing a user centric experience

Rapid sketching allowed us to visualize users' daily routines and identify the best opportunities to provide them with valuable and timely information. By taking the time to understand our users' needs and preferences, we were able to develop a notification system that felt natural and seamless, making it more likely that our users would engage with our app and see meaningful results

By carefully considering each step in the process and removing any unnecessary steps, we can create a seamless user experience that makes it easy and intuitive for users to achieve their goals without feeling bombarded with notifications.

Minimizing interactions

Task Flow

FEATURE ROADMAP

Lo-FI WIREFRAMES

BRANDING & VISUAL DESIGN

Creating a fun and engaging experience

Our branding and visual design played a critical role in the success of our habit-building app. We wanted to create an app that was not only effective but also engaging and approachable, helping users feel motivated and empowered throughout their habit-forming journey.

When designing the user interface for our habit-building app, we wanted to create a visual language that felt approachable and friendly, while still maintaining a modern and clean aesthetic. By using simple shapes and bright colors, we were able to create characters and illustrations that are visually appealing and welcoming, making users feel more comfortable and engaged with the app

Geometric shapes also allowed us to create a consistent and cohesive design language throughout the app. By establishing a clear and recognizable visual style, users can easily identify and remember the app. Additionally, this design approach enables us to create scalable and adaptable illustrations that can be used across different platforms and devices.

Our final logo, featuring a mountain peak with eyes, represents the idea of reaching new heights and conquering challenges, while the eyes evoke a sense of playfulness and curiosity

By designing all of our visual elements in-house, we were able to create a cohesive and recognizable brand identity that stands out in a crowded market. Additionally, we made sure that our branding was consistent across all touchpoints, from the app itself to our social media and marketing materials.

Optimizing User Onboarding for Long-term Success

Onboarding Design

The onboarding process is essential for fostering user engagement and long-term success with our habit-forming app. By guiding users through goal-setting, personalization, and customization options while emphasizing privacy, we create a positive foundation for their habit-building journey. Through a carefully crafted onboarding experience, we address users' needs, preferences, and concerns, paving the way for trust, engagement, and a sustainable relationship with our app.

Effortless User Experience with Passive Tracking and Simplified Dashboard

Hi-fi mockup

Our app's dashboard is designed to minimize the need for constant user interaction, while still providing valuable insights and guidance for habit formation. It displays daily goals, accomplishments, tips, upcoming milestones, and challenges, as well as an icon for users to find challenges when desired. Through passive observation and tracking, the app holds users accountable without requiring them to constantly monitor their progress. The straightforward layout of the dashboard and menu navigation options, including habit journey roadmap, leaderboards, habit management, and user profiles, ensures that users have an effortless experience when they do choose to engage with the app.

Widget design for easy access of most important information

Widget Design

Our app's dashboard is designed to minimize the need for constant user interaction, while still providing valuable insights and guidance for habit formation. It displays daily goals, accomplishments, tips, upcoming milestones, and challenges, as well as an icon for users to find challenges when desired. Through passive observation and tracking, the app holds users accountable without requiring them to constantly monitor their progress. The straightforward layout of the dashboard and menu navigation options, including habit journey roadmap, leaderboards, habit management, and user profiles, ensures that users have an effortless experience when they do choose to engage with the app.

Usability Testing & Feedback

Users love the concept and find the app promising, with minor improvements needed for navigation, tutorial, personalization, and feedback

OBJECTIVES

  • Evaluate user preferences regarding different communication channels

  • Understand how users perceive and engage with the app

  • Explore users’ use cases for incorporating the app into their daily lives

  • Ensure that our design decisions align with user expectations

TASK

  • Register new account & complete onboarding process

  • Create a new habit and interact with the app

  • Engage with various interfaces such as widget and apple watch

HOW

  • Unmoderated remote usability testing

  • 5 individuals who expressed interest in building new fitness-related habit

  • Participants were given a set task to perform within the app and asked to provide their feedbacks after their sessions

ROLES

  • Moderator

RESULTS

1. Unclear Icons

Users have a difficulty understanding the purpose of the challenge icon

ITERATION - Provide tooltips or hover-over explanations

  • We can also explore changing the icon to the one that people are more familiar such as a trophy/flag/road/puzzle/checkmark and conduct user testing to gather feedback and determine which icon resonates the most with users.

2. Unclear Labels

Users do not understand the meaning of the challenge descriptions in the Habits Overview page (such as "Stairs > Elevator +830 steps)

ITERATION - Add a concise header labeled "Challenge Completed", for users to easily identify and understand the challenges they have successfully achieved

3. Lengthy Onboarding

Users found the onboarding process to be lengthy and text-heavy, requiring significant reading and attention span

ITERATION - Visualize Information by using icons and illustrations to convey key information instead of relying solely on text. Simplify Language to make it more concise and user-friendly

FINAL CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE

*To view more clearly, click on upper right hand corner of each prototype to expand

Next steps

Although users expressed a strong interest in the concept and demonstrated a high willingness to download the app if developed, it's important to recognize that each habit journey requires a unique strategy to ensure success. To fully realize the app's potential, we need to conduct more in-depth research and collaborate closely with AI experts, interaction designers, behavioral scientists to develop effective strategies tailored to each habit. Moreover, our focus in this case study was primarily on the fitness category, but we also plan to explore other vital areas such as personal development, relationship building, and more. By continuing to iterate on our design and expanding our research scope, we aim to create a truly comprehensive and effective solution for our users.