Life Dojo is an app that offers 12 week, science based programs for people to improve on their health goals that they choose. International Life Dojo users are mainly employees looking to manage their stress levels, improve existing relationships, form good habits and maintain and improve their health physically, mentally and emotionally.
I inherited the established wellbeing app in 2021, along side its accompanying Coach app. Besides the general maintenance work for Life Dojo app, we launched 2 new features namely ‘Plus one’ and ‘Custom Habit’. In addition, I also completed the discovery phase for Life Dojo localization feature, specifically for French and Japanese.
I will be highlighting the custom habit feature here that we launched in partnership with one of our clients, Adobe.
problem statement
As an ongoing effort to continue to add value to our existing Life Dojo offerings, we are creating a custom habit program that allows a member to write-in their own habit goal and to have a program genarated around that habit.
research & user testing
This new custom habit feature will create a new pathway in the app, allowing users to create their own program, and provide more support for their own lives. Since Adobe has teams around the world, this custom habit feature can better cater to regional preferences instead of following a fixed set of habits allocated to the 4 different themed program that Life Dojo offers.
As an effort to recruit Adobe employees for user user research study, we collaborated with Adobe to sent out to randomized group of 500 employees around the world, to investigate the level of engagement with Life Dojo App offered as a company benefit. 43 employees responded with 10 agreed to participate in user testing. Out of the 10, we were able to interview 4 of them.
User Testing
The purpose of the study was to test the usability of the Custom Habit feature. The feature allows a LifeDojo user to enter a custom habit title within one of the four existing programs. The content in the Training tab reflects the program specific content of our prototype.
Between June 15-17, 2022, four Adobe employees who had previously used LifeDojo participated in the user research study.
Our Internal Goals
To validate that custom habit is an important feature that Adobe employees want to see in Life Dojo App. Explore user’s prior knowledge with respect to Life Dojo App in which this custom habit feature lives
To understand and validate our proposed custom habit selection feature user flow
Identify points of friction, iterate, and improve user flow before we invest in building this feature
Explore, observe, and record users' interaction with prototype to uncover hidden motivations behind users behaviors
We asked 2 categories of questions that are focused around Habit selection and around general Life Dojo app. The interviews provided many insights, validated a couple of our assumptions.
The following updates to the design are necessary based on the study:
Only one of the four users found the “Create your own” at the bottom of the list of all the habits. This suggests that the button should be anchored such that the button is more discoverable.
Update the image on the program selection confirmation screen so that it matches the program image.
Overall, the custom habit feature was perceived as valuable by most. There are important yet minor changes to make to the custom habit design to optimize the usability. These changes should not significantly increase the overall scope of the effort.
Most of the feedback from the study will serve to improve the LifeDojo product overall. For example, one common theme was that the content strategy needs to evolve because users are looking for less quantity and less content related to “the hard sell” of behavior change. Another theme was performance – there’s a perception that the app is slow and can be buggy. Lastly, the overall perception of the product leaves the user feeling underwhelmed. Users believe the product should perform better and deliver more value through personalization.
constraints
Lack of resource is our biggest constraint for Life Dojo products. My UX team was reduced from 5 to just myself over the >2 yrs I was there. This spreads to the engineering team as well where I have assets ready for build as planned out in sprints, but due to layoffs, the engineering team can only work on most urgent items and things like solving Life Dojo’s bugs to improve general performance often take a backseat.
The 2nd biggest constraint is working around how Life Dojo is structured and built. After a user has selected a themed program (Healthy Eating, Mastering Stress, Fit for Life, Science of Happiness), the set of Habits then presented for users to choose are intrinsically connected to the chosen program, in order to align and help them build a healthy habit over the 12 week program. By introducing a custom habit, we need to present all the habits we have set up, even those in other programs in order to mitigate the user writing a habit that already exists. This long list was presented in our user testing above and we solved it by anchoring the ‘CREATE YOUR OWN’ CTA at the bottom to address discoverability.
Product alignment with Member Problems
I would like to track and implement a habit that is not listed as part of the current LifeDojo habits. i.e., a custom habit.
I would like to use the checkin feature for my custom habit.
I would like content available in Training that will help me succeed with my custom habit
I would like my coach to guide me in implementing my custom habit.
With the above high level alignments and feedback from user testing, other than what I can address in the app, #4 requires Coach support and training.
process & responsibility
There is no one set of step by step process for me, it really depends on the project at hand. In this case, I started prototyping and collaborated closely with Adobe in my design and workflow before presenting the prototype to their employees during our user testing sessions.
Working closely with my product manager on detailed product requirements, below is a list of related pieces to complete in order to launch this custom habit feature:
Update onboarding slide show to include custom habit callout
Resubmission of updates to Apple/Play Stores
Habit Selection (where the bulk of the work shown above) - Show existing habit list, then give option to view list of habits from other programs, as well as Create your own option. Followed by frequency selection.
Training content will only represent program specific content that user has chosen, no habit-specific content will be displayed if user has chosen to create custom habit. Apply custom habbit name to desktop header
New icon for custom habit under Habit
Profile change habit shoud use the same habit flow as the first time habit selection experience
Email & Push Notification Messages to update Habit related emails/pushes to highlight customization
Mixpanel analytics to set up new custom habit select events to be tracked
