Habitwise: A habit case study
The Challenge
was to make an iOS app in 3 weeks that allows people to keep track and manage their habits, including location-based reminders.
The Team
- Jacob Horstmeier (Me) & Olivia Laboriel (Designers)
- Bailey McDaris & Brady Bentley (Developers)
- David Truong (Remote Developer)
Habits
We wanted to figure out what kind of habits people were keeping and how they were keeping them. When we sent out a survey through our social media platforms we were careful to make sure that our questions didn’t lead people to make up answers on the spot. In addition to asking what category of habits they were working on, we also included a question asking how serious they were about changing a habit. That way we could weed out misleading answers in our data.
It was timely with the new year as everyone hadn’t quite given up on their New Year’s resolutions yet. We ended up with over a hundred responses.
Responses
The majority of our responses were from female millennials. When I was researching common habits I noticed seven different categories that encompassed almost every type of typical habit you could make. So in the survey we asked people “what category of personal development are you most focused on?” and allowed for multiple answers. Between the Financial, Fitness, Intellectual, Diet & Food, Time Management, Personal Hygiene and Mindset categories, four were very close in popularity.
Obstacles
When survey participants were asked an open-ended question about what held them back from accomplishing their goals, a couple common themes arose.
- Poor planning
- Bad habits or absence of good habits
- Lack of motivation
68.2% of survey respondents used themselves as a tool to alter their habits. The remaining 31.9% were split almost evenly between using a friend or using a phone/writing for reminders.
Because such a large portion of people only relied on themselves to change their habits I wanted to interview an expert in habits. They would provide insights around the effectiveness of self discipline. I knew of a nearby Addiction recovery group leader and questioned him about what kept people from replacing bad habits with good ones and what prevented people from creating those good habits in the first place. While the ARP leader wanted to remain anonymous, he gave an important insight for changing your habits to improve your life:
Change your environment or replace the negative habit with a positive one
Your entire life is full of habits, some more obvious than others. Our brains are fantastic at grouping common tasks and creating habits so we don’t have to think about them. Have you ever driven to work and not remembered most of the drive there? Your brain doesn’t forget habits easily, as the reformed alcoholic will attest, just not doing them is not enough. You need to replace the bad habits with positive ones.
Not everyone is battling an addiction but the principle is still the same for trying to change a bad habit.
Research
I had been doing some research on the different types of goals and came across S.M.A.R.T. Goals. George Doran claimed that if you followed these principles when making a goal, you would be more likely to accomplish it.
Goals often aren’t realized because they aren’t following one or more principles from S.M.A.R.T. Taylor had tried many times to create new habits and goals but ended up falling short. Making sure the goals are measurable and timely will solve her frustration about seeing progress. Specific and attainable goals will help her feel in control of her life. Realistic goals can help mitigate the social pressure she feels.
Persona
To help us keep the design focused on our user, we chose to create a persona. That way we can refer to her goals and frustrations throughout the project. This is Taylor. Taylor wants to be able to see progress easier. That way she can be more motivated to stick with a new habit. Its hard not to compare herself to others on social media and get discouraged.
User Story
With an idea of our users goals and frustrations we could create a user story. The user story set the framework for what we want Taylor to do with our app. We wanted to include our developers when we created the user story. Involving them in the process not only gave us extra insights, but also helped the developers understand what the designers wanted when coding the app. We came up with four main goals.
- Set goals
- Maintain good habits
- View progress
- Manage my account
These goals would help Taylor accomplish her own goals, and mitigate her frustrations.
S.M.A.R.T. Integration
Moving forward into wireframes we came up with this method for making sure habits were aligned with S.M.A.R.T goals.
Users would specify the habit, create a measurable timeframe and be able to understand what they needed to do to be successful. Because they specified the amount of times they wanted to do or stop their habit, we could provide a visual indicator for how well the habit is going. We weren’t sure if the fill in boxes were intuitive, so we did some user testing to see how they would interact with the prototype.
Most users read in a descending order and filled out as they went along. They didn’t realize that they would be defining periods of time and frequency after the name. If the title of the habit was “Drink Water 6 times a day this month”, it was tedious to enter in the redundant information again right underneath. Notifications that relied on the habit name would look awkward when popping up as well.
Applying Feedback
To reduce frustration when creating a habit, we took away the description and placed the ‘define success’ immediately after the habit name area. This allowed for less confusion about what to name the users habit. Other user feedback indicated that the current use of symbols filling up to indicate progress was not intuitive. To make it easier to understand, we switched over to progress rings. Additional testing showed that users preferred the rings over the symbols.
With the main interaction ideated, tested, and iterated, we moved forward in fleshing out the other screens and views.
Hi-Fidelity
We handed off the wireframes to the developers and began working on our high fidelity designs. We wanted to be able to track category and habit progress on a graph, so we needed at least 9 colors for the categories. It was a challenge trying to find colors that were harmonious and deciding how much of each color to display on the page.
We ended up with ten colors, 9 for the different category habits and one for our app color. Because we had so many colors, we decided less is more. White evened out the strong colors.
Final Touches
Some last minute user testing told us that we should include a short, but skippable onboarding process. Users meandered a bit when first opening the app and through trial and error figured out how to use it. I went and created these onboarding screens for a quick overview of the app.
We then handed off our designs to the developers, ready to support them with any additional assets that they needed. They asked for a logo so I designed this logo.
In The End
Habitwise allows the user to create, maintain, or break habits. Progress is quick and intuitive. Location based reminders really help users with hectic schedules.
User feedback was paramount. Many issues we had not thought of became apparent through our testing. Having the chance to work with developers was a great experience. Working with them and understanding a little bit about their job helped us do better as a team.
Moving Forward
Within the three week design sprint we wanted to get the app into app store. Apple has guidelines to make sure apps are up to a certain standards so our developers wanted to submit to the app store. Currently a low-fidelity version of our app Habitwise is in the app store.
