Overview
WeUp is a habit-building app that allows you to join a group of friends to commit to a 30-day challenge that you and your friends will compete for real money. The Objective of the game is to complete your daily check-ins for the duration of the challenge and not to miss a day. If you do miss, you have a penalty fee that you have to contribute to the group pot. The more you miss the bigger the pot gets, BUT if you are the one missing, you will have a lower chance of getting the pot at the end of the challenge. The person with the most consistent record will have the best chance to win the pot at the end.
“When you’re struggling in life, turn your life into a game” -Adelaide Smith
We Up started its foundations with this quote and have grown into the Company it is today.
SPECS
My team:
Dave Schroeder,
Kayla Graves,
Alex Ripberger
My role:
Interaction Design
Research
Visual Design
Graphic Designer
Tools:
Duration
Figma
Maze
Miro
Asana
3-Week Sprint
Company Research
To understand WeUp, we had to look at the game mechanics from the original design they had given us. We used these screens to help us simplify WeUp’s original concept.
My team and I knew after looking at the design, that this project needed a UI upgrade and a reassessment of the overall goal of the app and the game mechanics. However, before creating solutions, we needed to truly get to know our user and our client. After getting to know WeUp as a brand through an in-depth review of internal documents, we felt confident going into our C&C analysis, user interviews, and other research regarding habit building and behavioral science.
We conducted an extensive C&C, comparing WeUp to 8 competitors, and examining over 30 factors of each app. These are what I felt were the most important factors when comparing WeUp to its biggest competitors. After the competitive and comparative analysis, we suspected the users to engage in multiple challenges at once in addition to video verification. These were features that should be explored in order to give WeUp a leg up when entering the app market.
RESEARCH
Even though habit building can engage several audiences, our client wanted to focus on appealing to millennial women as a result of previous research conducted regarding gamification. To ensure we were not working off of implicit bias, we did include millennial men in our research pool while keeping millennial women our target audience. Due to the pandemic, all user interviews had to be conducted via zoom, but this allowed us to interview users from all over the world keeping these research objectives in mind:
Deciphering the user's current feelings and practices surrounding habit building, including any apps they currently used.
Pinpointing the user's thoughts in regards to competition and offering or seeking support from friends and family.
Several hours later after many affinity map iterations, our user interviews informed some pretty definitive I-statements:
“I am motivated by my friends and family”
“I benefit from accountability (and verification)”
“I am motivated by material gains”
“I like to track my progress”
Personas
Our User research gave us the inspiration to make two personas, Maya, our primary persona, and Gabby our secondary persona. To Really understand the frustrations and problems these users may face, we created a third proto-persona, Rachel, to help us follow these users on their journey throughout the current app. This allowed us to personify our research findings and present them to our client in a visual way.
Self-reporting seemed untrustworthy
Rewards seemed too random to users
Accountability vs competition
The sun was intended to add some variety to the game, but the randomness of its appearance and lack of connection to building habits was confusing and frustrating to many of the users we interviewed
Our users felt that relying on self-reporting could introduce suspicion, and using a rating system as a countermeasure might allow users to game the system in their favor, especially if money was at stake.
This was the crux of the problem. WeUp’s Desire to build community and accountability between friends was at odds with the current game mechanics. The only way to win the game was for your friends to fail. And once real money is involved, we could be putting real friendships at risk.
Aha Moment!
Being able to create the User Journey game us the momentum to ideate the design and prioritize features:
Video verification
To address the verification issue my team came up with an idea of video verification due to what we saw in our C&C analysis. Users would record video directly to the app to prevent cheating using previously recorded uploads, and videos could be flagged for review if they seemed dubious.
2. Variable Rewards
While researching we came across some information on behavioral science that pushed us toward switching the random rewards with variable rewards. So instead of relying on the random appearance of fixed rewards, we had the opposite, fixed appearance of random rewards. By giving users an opportunity to win extra points every time they achieved a 5 day streak, a dopamine spike would occur in people that experience anticipation of a reward. We are doing this all while building their habits.
3. Accountability (Group vs Group)
The core of this game was to rely on competitors to keep you accountable but In order for that to happen, they have to work together not against each other. Just like that, we had our answer, we need to bring friends together by creating one common goal to achieve; one they could do alone. Now it’s not only money that is motivating them, but social pressure and a way to earn more money. By competing in tribe versus tribe competitions, users would have the potential to earn a much larger pot, as it would include the penalty money from other tribes as well as their own tribe.
Revisiting the game mechanics
For these solutions to work, we had to find a way to implement them in the original design they had given us at the beginning. So we built a new game flow that focuses on the app, identifying and prioritizing key features for inclusion
However we still need to get our stakeholders on board, so we started user testing to gather the data we needed.
Concept testing
We presented our two games and asked for feedback on both. Our participants overwhelmingly found the video verification to be more trustworthy than self-reporting, appreciated the control over earning rewards, and felt that unity and accountability were far more present in the group vs group challenges.
DESIGN
Wireframes
Usability Testing Insights
We finalized our wireframes and started to create an interactive design so we were able to begin our usability testing with 11 users. Our purpose was to find out how intuitive the navigation was, and how easily people were able to understand how the game mechanics worked.
Starting a new challenge
Our users felt that the voting method to start a challenge was too long, so we created a simple invitation to the other tribe members.
Creating a smooth interface
Instead of making each challenge a separate screen, we created a way to include the different challenge pages as swipe-able cards
An easier way to check-in
We wanted our users to be able to check-in fast, but what we had designed made it a little more complicated than we expected. So we implemented the check-in button within the challenges for users to be able to track their check-ins.
Switching up the Navigation
Our original design, you had to look for your tribes in the “challenge” tab and our users had trouble finding it. So we decided to add both Tribe and Challenge as their own tab in the navigation.
Final Design
New Logo
At the beginning of the project, WeUp asked us to work on developing an updated logo and branding to accompany the app redesign. We informed them that branding would be outside the scope of our project, but that we would explore options if we had the time
Click here to view full prototype
Future Considerations
Custom challenges and goals, which several competitors offer
The ability to join tribes with strangers
In-app messaging
Including external verification methods (APIs, wearables, phone tech, etc.)
Developing partnerships and building out the social good component
The End Result
We had the opportunity to present our designs to the CEO and other stakeholders. Our goals were met and they were ecstatic, we provided them with a prototype and deliverables to be able to make WeUp a reality.
My Takeaways
This project taught me a lot about myself and my future. In the beginning, I felt like I had imposter syndrome and I felt like I couldn’t bring anything to the table, but after working with a great team, It brought my confidence level way up, and now I want to be the best I can. I love UX Design and working in groups, feeding off each other’s ideas is what I live for.