Habit Starting: the Missing Link in the Productivity Market
What happens when a UX designer takes on the already-saturated space of productivity apps? He gathers all the best science from the likes of James Clear, Charles Duhig, and Steven R. Covey and puts it all in an app to help you start habits.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
2006
E-commerce
$1.578 billion (2019)
5,000+
Challenge
All habit apps on the market now exist for one purpose: habit tracking. There exists a range in their complexity, such as the number of graphs and metrics that some apps offer. However, the purpose always comes back to tracking.
Solution
When people want to start a new habit, the last thing they want to do is do more work to track it all. Starting new habits is hard. A habit starter needs all the help they can get, which is why I set out to make starting a habit as easy and fulfilling as possible. I began this design process with everyone’s favorite subject: science!
Process
Research & Analysis: Did you know that between 81% and 92% of new year’s resolutions fail?* That’s, for lack of a better term, A LOT!
*Study by John Norcross
Maybe this seems like common sense, but this statistic surprised me.
Another thing that surprised me was how simple the habits were that people wanted to start. Things like:
Run more
Drink more water
Wake up earlier
Eat when I’m hungry
Go to bed earlier
Stop vaping
Aside from the vaping one, since that has addiction complications, these all seemed so simple. So I asked people, “why don’t you just start them?”
The answers I received back were enlightening.
One of them came from a woman named C who gave me a super honest and helpful answer. The hardest part of starting her new habit was the temptation and comfort of keeping with her existing habits of shopping and overspending.
“It's difficult to start new habits when the reality is that I'm addicted to shopping and would rather just spend my money ”
This got me thinking….habit starting/breaking is way more complicated than people make it out to be. There’s no way someone could successfully change their lifestyle simply by tracking behavior. Furthermore, users of current habit apps like “habit-tracker,” “goalify,” and “productive-habit tracker” told me that they had some problems with these apps.
One user named P admitted that the last thing he wants to do at the end of a long day is track his habits — especially if he hasn’t done them.
“It’s just doing more work that makes you feel like a failure,” he said.
Other problems with existing apps had more to do with time. 66% of those surveyed said they would simply forget to use the habit apps they downloaded onto their phones. Been there, bro. Been there.
Digging deeper: Once I had all this research, I formed a hypothesis. I thought that the first week of starting a habit is the most difficult, and all the following weeks are a breeze. So, I set out to validate this thought.
Turns out, I was right! Look at my google survey form below:
Turning to the Experts
He has this really cool chart on his website that summarizes everything one needs to know about habit-starting or habit-breaking.
And for breaking habits
With this knowledge in mind, I wanted to help people break their new habits down into achievable, bite-sized pieces. I also wanted to encourage action.
Ideation
Could I design an app that prompts people to think about how to make their habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying? And could I spur people on to actually put their phones down and do that small action item?/ How about one that helps people break habits down following James Clear’s four tables above?
Yes, I could actually. All I had to do was make an app that helped people program what they would do to make their new habits:
obvious
attractive
easy
satisfying
Welcome to Breeze: the app to really help you start habits
Login
The user puts their info in to login
Home screen
After onboarding, the user can see all the habits that they programmed in AND what each habit's breakdowns are (how they will make each habit obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying).
Check ins
On the check-in part of the app, the user is asked whether or not they did each habit that day, which habit breakdowns were helpful. They then have the opportunity to change their habit breakdown to one that other users have found helpful.
Next Steps
Some users told me that they felt they would be more committed to their new habits if they better understood the effect it would have on their life.
In this spirit, I would absolutely love to add a database where people can go to see the science behind certain habits. If someone wants to drink more water but doesn’t know the benefits of staying hydrated, they could go to this database and find the data that will motivate them.
Lessons Learned
There were many times during this project when I felt like “I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, but I’m excited and it seems to be working.” While some prefer to have a roadmap of the entire project in their heads, I find that overwhelming, especially due to the constantly changing nature of design projects
Don’t let uncertainty hold you back. Make some design decisions and be ok that they will be imperfect, and just keep chugging along even if you do feel uncertain
I need to give myself more time to make prototypes on Figma. There’s so much one can do and learn with this program that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the possibilities and waste time
Good on me for trying to validate all of my design decisions with UX research. I’m very happy that my 16 survey respondents validated the idea that I already had in my head 🙃
Resist the temptation to create from zero. Instead, look at references and see how other people have done it
Don’t be afraid to rely on my classmates and coworkers to test my designs early on. Better to test a lo-fi idea than a hi-fi mess