Habitify App

Overview: Habitify is an app which enables university students and recent graduates to stay accountable for their personal goals through an accountability partner and gain small wins towards creating a new identity.

Timeline: 3 months

My role: User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, UI Design & User Testing

“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking”

James Clear

Problem Statement

University students and recent graduates stay consistent in pursuing their academic goals but struggle to maintain or create healthy goals related to their personal development. This led to the question of why there is a lack of consistency.

The Solution

Send Evidence to Accountability Partners

Track and create new daily small wins
Customise and set different accountability partners for each goal
Send photo evidence after completing small win to selected accountability partner

Share small wins and progress with community groups
Engage with community groups as a form of a support network
Check-in with accountability partners

Engage With Community

Select or create own goals you want to accomplish.
Get recommendations for different small wins based on the long term goal.
Select accountability partners to share evidence with.

Build a System With Small Wins

Process

Competitive Analysis + The Gap

Based on the insight gathered from desk research related to building a system of small wins to achieve a long-term goal, I decided to take that forward by analysing 5 popular habit-tracking apps to identify any gaps in the market from direct and indirect competition. Since the productivity and goal-setting market is already oversaturated, the aim was to see what can be improved within this space.

Apps analysed include:

Key Insight From Competitive Analysis:

After analysing the apps mentioned below none of them focus on building a daily system and only on medicating to the surface-level focus of tracking the user’s day-to-day progress. The apps mentioned above also do not offer users a tangible framework which they can incorporate to their daily routines that would allow them to stick to their goals in the long term.

User Interviews + Synthesising Data

To gain a deeper understanding of my users’ experiences with goal setting and dive deeper into the topic, I decided to conduct interviews with 6 users which included students and recent graduates who often struggle to maintain a new habit. The goal was to find common themes related to where users currently think there are challenges which lead them to fail with their personal goals. After doing interviews with users, the next step was to do an affinity mapping exercise to find common insights and themes.

Some of the questions asked:

How do you currently go about setting a new goal?
What’s your relationship like with creating and maintaining healthy habits?
What motivated you to start in the beginning?
What was the most difficult part about trying to maintain the new habit? Why?

Research Insights

Accountability

Lack of accountability when not maintaining a new habit and creating unrealistic goals which are not as well planned

Community

Users are more inclined to stay consistent when surrounded by a sense of community and people making the same change

Progress Visualisation

Users feel their progress is not making any difference or have any outcome

Building Empathy Through Personas

Based on the data gathered, I decided to create a user persona to visually capture my research in a visual format. Another goal behind creating a user persona was also to have a point of reference when making user-focused design decisions during the ideation phase.

How Might We

Make university students and recent graduates feel more responsible for their personal development related goals?

Conceptualising Different Ideas + Redirection

After extensive research and analysing different ideas, I decided to focus towards creating an app solution as the that will fit better with the needs of my users especially with the data obtained from the research.

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

The aim was to create wireframes using Figma with the objective of conducting usability testing with users. The goal was to use these wireframes as a form of communication tool for users and validate design decisions. Allowing to bring further clarity and tangibility to the final product decisions.

User Flow

Usability Testing + Iterations

Using the wireframes, the aim at this stage was to conduct usability testing with 10 participants to gather feedback. The outcome of testing led to small changes to improve the navigation of the app making the designs as intuitive as possible. When creating the usability testing plan, the objective was to uncover pain points users had in the experience when using the app concept.