A Pixel A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
Building Healthy Habits Using Digital Design

“A pixel a day keeps the doctor away”
The above quote is a modern piece of wisdom that roots from a popular ancient saying about apples.
If I tell you to have an apple today, it won’t be that difficult, you’ll just need to find an apple and eat it.
Let’s step this up a level now: If I tell you to eat an apple everyday for the rest of your life, it’ll be hard for you to build that habit, and eventually get your body to automate that daily process.
However, if you’re successful, the metaphorical apple will bring many benefits to your life!
I design for a company called Optimity — A mobile first solution that helps people develop healthy habits and drive down individual and community health costs.

Building habits isn’t easy and we’ve all succeeded and failed in doing so in the past. There are a lot of ways to make habit-building easier and everyone has their own tricks. In this post, I narrow down on 4 approaches we use at Optimity in order to implement common habit-building philosophies:
1) Anchor Your Habit
Habits are best built if they are chained into your current schedule. Take a pre-existing habit or regular scheduled occurrence and try building a habit around that. A simple cause-effect relationship will make it easier to remember and hold yourself accountable.
For instance, say you want to “go to the gym daily”; See where it fits in with your current schedule and rephrase your habit to something like “I will go to the gym after coming back home from work”.
Where do we start with Optimity? We picked an easy target — notifications.
When your phone goes beep, you look at it.
We send out quick notifications throughout the day to remind yourself to take care of yourself. These notifications trigger mini activities like stretches, wellness tips and meditation exercises.
If you can take out a minute to look at your notifications, I’m sure you can take out 30 seconds to work on your health.
2) Motivation
When you’re designing for wellness, you need to take a step back and realize that you’re building something that can improve someone’s quality of life. As a designer, you’re actively shaping someone’s lifestyle choice. We also need to acknowledge that everyone has different wellness goals & different motivations.
Our app triggers 3 main motivation loops that keeps bringing people back:
A) Personal Health — People do the exercises our app pushes out to them and come back for more because they see a change in their lifestyle.
B) Social — People love social recognition. With our app’s leaderboards, you can see where you rank in comparison with your peers. Who doesn’t like a little bit of competition? *my favourite*
C) Incentives — Reward yourself every time you reach a goal! With our app, you can trade your points for gift cards from brands such as Starbucks and Amazon. Now that’s a sweet deal which everyone loves. *crowd favourite*
3) No Excuses
Do you know why our alarms have snooze buttons? Because we are the best at finding the smallest of excuses to avoid doing things. When building a habit, you need to make sure you have no excuses whatsoever.
Remove all obstacles in your way in advance — in fact, leverage them to assist you!
We automatically sync your digital activities so it’s barely any extra effort at your end .You may or may not already know this but most smartphones automatically track your steps. Additionally, we integrate with a ton of other 3rd party apps to make it easier for you to manage your habits. We pull this data and engage you so you already have some momentum to get going.
Before you even know it, you’ll be 10 points away from a $20 Starbucks gift card. Since that’s the case, you might as well go the extra mile :)
Another example is that our notification system optionally syncs with your calendar — now if you tell us you’re “too busy”, we know when it’s not true. You don’t have any excuses now, do you?
4) Accountability
Accountability ties in heavily with the social aspect of habit building. Sometimes your best support system is your personal fanbase.
When you’re building a habit, tell the whole damn world about it!
If you tell people about your new habit pursuit, they’re more likely to ask about it sometime in the future — and hence keep you accountable. Before you know it, you’ll have a whole community to keep you motivated.
At Optimity, we link up with your network to achieve this effect. We use leaderboards, competitions, team challenges amongst other features to engage your community.
And yes, you can share your health and wellness achievements with your network!
When you have a whole community that’s willing to develop healthy habits, it’s piece of cake for you to do the same.
Yes, building habits is really hard — we try to use design to make it easier. So indeed, when pixels and apples come together, it’s a lot easier to keep the doctor away.

This post is based on a presentation with the same title given by Nivit Kochhar at ‘DesignMeets: Digital Health & Wellbeing’.
Nivit currently works as a Product Manager and User Experience Designer at Optimity and is a Fellow at Venture for Canada.
