Attain App Streaks & Badges
In Attain, users earn points for their health interactions that can then be redeemed for gift cards or Apple Watch payment. To support a new user base, Attain needed to create an additional engagement mechanism to support user achievement. The goal of this feature was to create a sense of accomplishment in app to support the health focused behavior change without a financial component.
Attain's user base was traditionally comprised of Aetna Commercial Members whose employers chose Attain as a wellness benefit. This new feature would be deployed to all users but was especially essential to new user groups of CVS Specialty and CVS Caremark members who could not receive financially driven rewards. CVS Specialty is a service that provides specialized prescriptions typically for members with chronic conditions. CVS Caremark is a Pharmacy Benefit Manager that provides savings and home delivery for its members.
The design and research team conducted several research studies before beginning any design work to better understand user needs and behavior change engagement tactics that may be beneficial to the Attain user group. Several workshops were also conducted with Product and Design to define scope of the features.
To better understand how other apps motivate their users, a competitive analysis was conducted. All told, 16 pieces of software were evaluated including health and wellness apps an out of category products.
Two avenues arose from the research: 1) Rewarding points but giving users non-monetary items to redeem them for, like power-ups and aesthetic customization options. 2) Removing points from the experience, but implementing badges, streaks, and social features.
The research team reviewed internal and external resources to evaluate behavior change techniques for motivation. This resulted in recommendations for Attain moving forward:
• Reward users for app interactions without a point transaction: achievements, streaks, and increased social features
• Focus on other mechanisms of enhancing intrinsic motivation & influencing long term behavior change. For example:
Enable meaningful goal setting, Offer concrete, clear and relevant feedback, Engage in barrier identification
• Reward users for app interactions without a point transaction: achievements, streaks, and increased social features
• Focus on other mechanisms of enhancing intrinsic motivation & influencing long term behavior change. For example:
Enable meaningful goal setting, Offer concrete, clear and relevant feedback, Engage in barrier identification
To narrow down the scope of this feature, members of the design, product and engineering came together, armed with the findings of the two research efforts. During this workshop, the team reviewed uncovered techniques and ranked them on their assumed importance to the user and technical feasibility.
Going off the Prioritization Grid, the design team explored some of the techniques that scored high on feasibility and user importance. This exploration process as well as strategic discussions with product narrowed down the scope of the feature to Streaks and Badges. These techniques would give users a motivator that encourages daily usage, higher activity completion and competition with their past selves.
Design further explored how Streaks and Badges would integrate into Attain app and prepared for validation with users in moderated usability research studies.
Implementing Streaks for Healthy Actions reinforces healthy behavior while creating habits of daily app use. In Activity, streaks for Weekly Goals encourages physical activity while supporting the current Activity goal structure. Badges would be awarded for achievement throughout the app experience for several categories of interactions and could increase over time.
The team conducted a moderated test with current Attain users and potential users of CVS Caremark/Specialty members.
Test goals:
• Uncover user's interpretations of streaks, badges and not earning points in app
• Understand users's preference on Badge categorization and placement
• Understand user perception of the logic for earning Streaks and Badges
• Uncover user's interpretations of streaks, badges and not earning points in app
• Understand users's preference on Badge categorization and placement
• Understand user perception of the logic for earning Streaks and Badges
Results:
• Validated Streaks and Badges as a motivation tactic with users
• Uncovered UI updates to make designs & experience more intuitive and motivating
• Understood the level of data users want to have available for progress tracking in app
• Found the need for further exploration of the relationship between Badges and current Rewards tab
• Validated Streaks and Badges as a motivation tactic with users
• Uncovered UI updates to make designs & experience more intuitive and motivating
• Understood the level of data users want to have available for progress tracking in app
• Found the need for further exploration of the relationship between Badges and current Rewards tab
MVP Designs for Streaks: The goal of Streaks feature in Attain is to increase users consistent engagement with the app. Streaks would be earned by users both within Activity and Healthy Actions. Streaks would start upon the second completion of an action, for Activity a Streak starts with 2 weeks consecutive completion of Weekly Activity Goal, for Healthy Actions a Streak starts with 2 days consecutive completion of a Healthy Action card. Users can view their current Streak and best Streak within the Activity and Healthy Actions tabs. Designs were provided for iOS and Android portrait views as well as for dynamic type and landscape orientation and reviewed with engineering for technical implementation.
MVP Designs for Badges: Badges would be awarded to all users throughout the app on both iOS and Android platforms. Users who are eligible for financial rewards would view Badges as part of their current "Rewards" tab from the bottom navigation. Non-financial program users would see a "Badges" tab in the bottom navigation instead of "Rewards". From the main tab, users can view their recent Badges and high level stats for achievements across the app. Designs were provided for iOS and Android portrait view as well as for dynamic type and landscape orientation and reviewed with engineering for technical implementation.
MVP Designs for Badges: Users could tap into the detailed view of Badges section of the app in order to view by category and specific Badge details. For example in "Activity Badges" view a user could swipe through achieved, in progress and available badges across this section of the app. By tapping on a specific badge, users could drill into a detail view and see more information on how to earn the badge, track progress toward the badge and see related badges available. This was validated by user's preference and interactions in usability testing.
At launch of each feature, all users would receive an in app full screen notification to educate and drive excitement for the new engagement mechanism. Users would also receive notifications in app when they completed badges that could include several badge achievements.
Several workshopping and discovery sessions were held with design, product and engineering to evaluate how users earn badges throughout the app and which of badges could be implemented in app. Milestones, one-off surprise and delight moments and special occasions were identified as possible achievements users could receive badges for.
• Identified and defined several badge types across the 4 sections of the app (Activity, Healthy Actions, Challenges and Program)
• Defined around 120 Badges that would span across a user's 2-year plan
• Determined naming conventions and themes in collaboration with Content Strategy
• Added a feature called "Related badges" where users get suggestions for what they can collect next
• Defined around 120 Badges that would span across a user's 2-year plan
• Determined naming conventions and themes in collaboration with Content Strategy
• Added a feature called "Related badges" where users get suggestions for what they can collect next
Look and feel of badges system was explored with a focus of developing a system that could represent achievements across the app and easily expand as the product grew.
Unfortunately, the Attain app was sunset before this feature was implemented in production.