Context
This is a personal project that expanded the Habitify app. Habitify is a personalized habit tracker app designed for iOS, Android, and the Web. Recently, they’ve been attempting to increase social participation by pushing a feature called challenges. While many are signing up for challenges, very few are actively participating.
I worked on this project from conception, to research, to design.
Team and Role
Solo Product Designer
UX Methods
User Interviews • Competitive Analysis • Secondary Research • Affinity Mapping • User Flows • Sketching • Wireframing • Prototyping • Usability Testing
Project Type
Personal Project
Year
2023
Duration
7 Weeks
Goal
The goal was to improve social engagement. This would help users stay more consistent with their habits. It would also help the business steal market share while improving user retention.
Problem
The problem was Habitify’s social features were inflexible and limiting. There were only two ways users could share their habit progress. This resulted in accountability buddies looking elsewhere to find the tools they need to support each other.
Share Habits via Link
Users could only share habits via link, but it was limited to one habit at a time and viewable only in a browser.
Participate in Challenges
Challenges let users compete in building a single habit. The person who was the most consistent won. Despite many sign-ups, few actively participated.
Solution
The solution did not focus on the challenge feature. It focused on improving Habitify’s habit sharing functionality. Instead of only being able to look at another person’s habit via a link or challenge, users could now add each other as friends, and view all their habits within the app.
A GIF of the solution. Users could now manage a friends list, and view each other’s habits.
*I am not affiliated with Habitify. All logos and trademarks belong to Habitify. This case study was a hypothetical design exploration.*
When starting this project, I saw that Habitify was attempting to increase social participation on their app. Recently, they’ve been attempting to increase social participation by pushing a feature called challenges.
Share a habit via link
I couldn't collect user data on this feature. But the lack of engagement in challenges, and secondary research on preferred social habit trackers, led me to assume that the usage was low.
Participate in challenges.
Challenges let users compete in building a single habit. The person who was the most consistent won. Despite many sign ups, few actively participated.
Business Perspective
For the business, better social engagement would increase retention because users are sticking to their habits. It would also increase market share due to Habitify being a bigger brand compared to it's competitors in the habit tracking space.
User Perspective
For users, they want to be consistent with their habits. Better social engagement would help them with that via social accountability. There are many existing studies that point to accountability as an important tool for habit creation. There are also Facebook groups and Reddit forums dedicated to finding accountability buddies.
Users weren't engaging in challenges because of the lack of connection with fellow participants.
Users weren't engaging in challenges because the habit selection and habit frequency were too strict.
Users didn't use existing social features because they couldn't find people in their friend group that wanted to participate.
Research Goals:
Identify what aspects of social accountability make people more likely to achieve their goals.
Evaluate our competitors and identify what social accountability features are expected and can be improved upon.
Describe the reasons why users were not sticking to challenges.
Blind Spots
Quantitative data on individuals participating in private challenges and linking to their habits. Based on the amount of users not participating challenges I made the assumption that users were not using private challenges and sharing habits via links.
Data on international users.
Until then, I only knew my opinions of the app. I conducted secondary research to understand other people's perspective. I looked at many different reviews, social media post, and forums to achieve this.
What I learned:
People generally liked the app.
People didn't necessarily like challenges, rather, it was the ability to share their habit building journey with others that they liked.
I conducted 4 user interviews. A challenge I faced was I didn't have access to current users. Since my goal for this method was to identify the aspects of social accountability that contributed to goal achievement, I thought interviewing people who had an accountability partner would still provide valuable insight.
What I learned:
The ability to watch others while knowing someone might also be watching you is a reason why social accountability works.
Social accountability only works when it involves someone that they know and trust.
People look to social accountability partners to feel supported, safe, and inspired. They aren't looking to compete.
Flexibility in habit building is important.
I conducted a competitive analysis on a various habit tracking apps to identify features users expected when participating in social habit tracking.
What I learned:
All habit tracking apps with a social component, had a level of privacy control for each individual habit.
Many habit trackers had limited habit tracking functionality, subpar UX, and a smaller team when compared to Habitify.
I focused on pre-existing personal relationships (existing accountability buddies, friends, mastermind groups). The decision stemmed from user interviews. It confirmed my assumption that a deeper connection is crucial for social accountability to work.
Many existing users likely didn't align with the accountability buddy user type. I was fine with that since the businesses goal was to steal marketshare. I believed Habitify could achieve this considering its company size, current market share, habit tracking functionality, and competitors' weaknesses.
Another potential direction was to try to help existing users build deeper connections with each other. But encouraging users to form the meaningful relationships needed to take advantage of social accountability was both difficult and problematic.
In the user interviews, it was mentioned that people look for social accountability partners to feel supported, safe, and inspired. The baseline functionality needed for that to happen is visibility. Users needed to be able to see each other’s habits so that they can support and help each other.
I hypothesized that accountability buddies used our competitors' products instead of ours because they better catered to their needs. User interview participants pointed out the importance of flexibility, support, and visibility for social accountability. However, Habitify's challenges functionality was inflexible and was based on competition not support. Sharing one habit at a time via URL made visibility into a friend’s habit progress difficult.
Enable challenges but with different habits.
User interviews showed accountability buddies needed flexibility when habit sharing. This solution would give users more flexibility to share different habits, but it was still limiting. Challenges would still be single habit focused, temporary, and not connected to the user’s main stats and habits. In addition, user interviews told us they preferred support over competition.
Allow users to share ALL habits at once via link
This solution would reduce the friction it takes for users to share all their habit progress. Instead of sharing habits one at a time, they could share them all with one link. However, competitive analysis showed that privacy settings are important and this approach would make that difficult to implement. Also, this would not be robust enough to gain significant market share.
Allow users to share and view each other’s habits via in-app functionality
This was the solution I decided on. It reduced the friction it took users to view each other’s progress and it offered flexibility in the way they supported each other. It also created a foundation for future features that could help accountability buddies with their goals.
I wanted to think through the step by step process of each story without getting bogged down by the UI details. This process helped me identify design requirements, constraints, and edge cases before I even started wireframing.
View Friend’s Habits
This feature was foundational. Accountability buddies needed to see each other's progress so that they can support each other. In addition, it's motivating. User interviews show that watching others while knowing someone might also be watching you increases the likelihood of completing a habit.
Change Habit Privacy
The competitive analysis showed that giving users the ability to change their habit privacy was needed. All habit tracking apps with a social component, had a level of privacy control for each individual habit. Which made sense because habit building can be very personal.
Find and Add a friend
To make this feature viable, enabling users to manage a friend's list is important. There would be too much friction if the user had to search for their friend, or get a link every time they wanted to view their friend's habits.
Remove a friend
Giving users control is a fundamental principle of UX. Users need to be able to correct mistakes, change their mind, cancel, or undo an action.
Cancel Friend Request
Accept and Deny Friend Request
View Friend’s Habits
I created a "social" navigation tab that combines the user's friends list and challenges because there was no room for an additional tab. Free users have an extra tab prompting to sign up for premium.
Change Habit Privacy
To avoid disrupting the current user's mental model, I handled privacy settings similarly to how the app manages other habit settings. This is one of three ways users can adjust habit privacy.
Find and Add a friend
There was already an experience for users to invite friends to challenges. I chose to use a similar modal experience for adding friends. This avoids managing two sets of components and experiences, while probably also minimizing the amount of dev work needed.
Remove a friend
User's can remove friends on each individual friend page. I didn't include the ability for users to remove friends from the friend's list level because it wasn't necessary.
Users probably won't have a long friend's list, so they're not going to need a quick way to remove multiple friends at once. Also excluding this functionality at the top level provides more flexibility for the future.
Cancel Friend Request
I included the functionality to cancel a friend request in the "add a friend" modal as a quick way to undo the action of adding a friend.
Accept and Deny Friend Request
I chose icon buttons for the accept and dismiss actions because it was the most space efficient option. This allowed more room for longer names and avoided pushing down the user's friends list significantly.
Since I was out of the exploratory phase and the user tasks were “lightweight”, I thought that this would be the right UX method to use. I wasn't focused on optimization. I was more concerned with whether users could complete the task with relative ease.
What I learned:
The completion rate was high (91.5%).
The completion rate for changing habit privacy settings was high (95.5%), but so was the misclick rate (44.6%) and indirect completion rate (40.9%).
A heat map of the habit details screen. Most clicking the "share with" block first.
A GIF of the changes I made. Users can now select the "share with" block to change the privacy settings of a habit.
Instead of only being able to look at another person’s habit via a link or challenge, users could now add each other as friends, and view all their habits within the app.
Original Design
Share Habits via Link
Users could only share habits via link, but it was limited to one habit at a time and viewable only in a browser.
Participate in Challenges
Challenges let users compete in building a single habit. The person who was the most consistent won. Despite many sign ups, few actively participated.
Solution
A GIF of the solution. Users could now manage a friends list, and view each other’s habits.
Adding a high level number for each friend on the friend’s list page
By adding a perfect day streak or total habit completion percentage to each person on the friend's list page, it doubles down on what users said about the motivating factor of being watched. Knowing that it's even easier for people to see you serves as extra inspiration.
Messages
This adds an extra level of interaction and community that user interview participants mentioned were so valuable in their self improvement journey. This would provide users the ability to encourage, celebrate, and view each other’s habits all in one place.
Reminding friends about their habits
During user interviews, participants noted that one reason they don’t complete their habits is that they forget. Having some sort of way for friends to kindly remind each other of a habit could be helpful.
