Helping users develop healthy habits through custom activity challenges
When faced with a demand for tracking non-movement-based activities, we saw the perfect opportunity to build from two existing challenge modes and create a new product offering to promote healthy habits.
Building upon movement-based activities to create an inclusive wellness platform
Since day one, MoveSpring has provided fun and approachable activity challenges to companies and organizations. However, challenges were limited to movement-based activities captured by users’ wearable devices: steps, distance, and active minutes.
As we started to engage with more clients through annual subscriptions and ongoing wellness programs, we saw an increased demand for the ability to track any activity…and to compete on that activity. The timing of this demand also aligned with the height of the pandemic when clients were looking for ways to help employees focus on incorporating healthy habits into their daily routines while working from home.
We knew that health is so much more than physical activity: what you eat, how you manage stress, your quality of sleep. Choosing to develop this feature was a no-brainer: custom activity tracking aligned closely with our mission to create an inclusive wellness platform.
Adapting established features for a streamlined design solution
Solving the problem of how to introduce custom activities into a challenge-based context was easy. Our flexible design system set the stage for adapting our two daily challenge modes that already focus on promoting habitual activity in an inclusive, approachable way: Stick to It and Streak.
Stick to it
In Stick to It, users aim to reach a daily goal a specified number of times over the course of a challenge. No matter the goal, the focus is on consistent effort and progress toward creating healthy habits.
Examples:
- Reach 5,000 daily steps 20 times over the next 2 months.
- Meditate for 5 minutes 10 times over the next 14 days.
Streak
Streak tracks the number of consecutive days a user meets their goal. Participants try to see how long they can make their streak last, starting over if they miss a day.
Examples:
- Try to reach 30 active minutes each day for two weeks.
- Drink 8 glasses of water each day for 30 days.
By replacing our usual progress chart with the name of a custom activity and completion status, we were able to accommodate any activity in these two challenge modes. Our component-driven challenge designs adapted to the rest.
One question remained: how do we capture the completion of a custom activity?
Up to this point, MoveSpring’s activity challenges were completely automated without requiring direct user input. During onboarding, users connect a wearable device and their activity data is synced and scored into their challenges every time they open the app. With custom activities, we needed a way for users to mark an activity as complete.
The solution: incorporating our “swipe to complete” interaction pattern. From multiple touchpoints within the app, users simply tap to log an activity and swipe to complete. Ahh, the satisfaction ✅
By relying heavily on our established patterns and components, the design and development process was streamlined and we introduced countless new ways to compete within a familiar challenge environment.
The result
Supporting wellness goals and healthy habits, not just activity goals and steps
Clients began to run wellness-based challenges that focused on mindfulness, gratitude, water consumption, and sleep by pairing custom activity challenges with educational content. By adding custom activities to the supportive, community-based features that are core to MoveSpring, we opened the door to new strategies in programming that extend beyond movement-based activities and offer something for everyone.
Custom activities opened the door to running challenges that focus on wellness, not just fitness, increasing MoveSpring’s offerings as an inclusive wellness platform.
The app is very user friendly. The content cards and variety of challenges available have really boosted engagement in our fitness challenge.
— Taylor E, admin at a small company
“A major benefit to using MoveSpring would have to be the diversity within the challenges. I love that MoveSpring promotes fun and friendly competitions, so that all attendees are able to feel comfortable enough to participate”
— Ciera G, admin at a mid-sized company