Building Healthy Brushing Habits
Brushing Frequency
Improvement
UX/UI Designer
By leveraging cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions, Colgate is committed to revolutionizing the way individuals approach oral care. Through the Connected Health app, we aim to empower users with personalized insights and real-time feedback, enabling them to make informed decisions about their brushing routines. Our ultimate vision is to not only enhance brushing habits but also to promote overall dental health and well-being worldwide.
Context
Challenge
Despite the multiple features in the Connected Health app aimed at encentiving users to brush their teeth twice per day, 30% of users still only brush once per day. The average brushing frequency of the entire user base 1.3 times per day. Despite the quantity of information about the benefits of brushing twice per day it was difficult for the Colgate Health app to ever improve the average brushing frequency.
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As a team, we were tasked with elevating the brushing frequency within our user base. With the goal of promoting better oral health and a more engaged user experience, our responsibility was to conceptualize and develop new features or enhance existing ones. This project required a collaborative effort aimed at not only meeting our users' needs, driving them towards consistent and effective oral care routines. It was a dynamic and exciting challenge that encouraged us to think creatively and innovate in ways outside of typical oral care apps.
Objectives
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Gain strong insight into what keeps users from brushing 2 minutes, twice per day
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Develop potential solutions to improve brushing frequency
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Implement best solution based on user testing results
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Improve brushing frequency to a minimum of 1.7 times per day
Research
Before beginning the brainstorming process, we recognized the importance of establishing a robust foundation of habit psychology. By diving deep into the details of human behavior and habit formation, we aimed to leverage this knowledge and integrate it into the features we design.
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This endeavor involved a comprehensive exploration of habit triggers, behavioral cues, and the underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive habit formation and sustainability. From this we learned about the Habit Loop and some important details about developing habits, such as:
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It takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become a habit (Lally et al,. 2009).
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Habitual behavior is more likely to be adopted when the behavior is perceived as easy (Balleine & O'Doherty).
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Goal setting, self-monitoring, and social support facilitate new habits (Michie et al,. 2011)
Why People Don't Brush
Along with learning about habit formation it was imperative that we established what prevented users from brushing twice per day. To do this we conducted 15 user interviews using UserTesting.com and received the following reasons for why users skip one to two brushing sessions.
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Too busy in the morning/night to brush
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Do not see the importance of brushing twice per day
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Forget to brush as part of morning/night routine
The Habit Loop
The habit loop is a comprehensive framework that encapsulates all the crucial components involved in the formation of a new habit. These four key elements, Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward, of a habit are intricately interconnected, relying on one another to perpetuate the cycle.
Therefore, when we embarked on the design process, it was imperative that we kept all four elements at the forefront. This ensured that our designs are not only effective but also holistically aligned with the dynamics of habit formation and reinforcement.
What Currently Exists
After completing research on habit formations we did an audit on what the best habit forming features in the app were at the time. The main two features were the Smile Points that users earned after each brushing session and the challenges we provided to users allowing them to earn Smile Points at a higher rate.
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Users could earn 1 Smile Point after a brushing session which equated to one cent of USD, if users accumulated enough Smile Points they would be able to redeem them in the Colgate store for physical product.
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The challenges aim to help users develop better brushing habits as they have users brush for 2 minutes twice per day for a certain number of days. If the users are able to complete the goal they redeem a larger pot of Smile Points.
Challenges/Smile Points
Shop
Brainstorm Session
I was given the responsibility of running a brainstorming session composed of people from Colgate who had expertise throughout the company, with the goal of finding an answer to the question: How might we improve the brushing frequency of our existing audience via the Colgate app?
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We divided into three different teams, and I assigned a persona to each team, for them to use in their brainstorming. Along with that I outlined for the participants what ideas were considered out of scope for what we were looking for, which was anything that introduced a new technology into the app. For example, voice recognition and collaboration with other companies would be considered out of scope. All ideas had to utilize the way the app currently worked.
Persona 01
Aneka
Aneka, 40 year old, busy mom of two who brushes once per day using the Colgate app. She works a full time job from home and is often too tired to brush at night. She understands the importance of oral health.
Her goal is to have healthy oral habits for her and her family.
Persona 02
Jane
Jane is a 27 year old female who is very proactive about her health and likes to be in control of her habits. She is single and loves to travel, workout, and meet new people. She takes very good care of her health and brushes twice per day for 2 minutes.
Her goal is to maintain her oral health and have a bright white smile.
Persona 03
John
John is a 24 year old male social person who loves going out and dreams of becoming an actor one day. He is motivated to take care of his teeth but is sometimes forgetful. Despite brushing twice per day often, he occasionally only brushes once per day.
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His goal is to have a bright smile for his acting career.
Takeaways
By the end of the brainstorming session there were 9 total ideas generated. After analyzing the different ideas I was able to decipher two different trends that existed. First was that all three teams had thought of at least one idea around educating users about the benefits of healthy brushing habits. The second trend was the improvement of gamification throughout the app.
Direction
After analyzing the two main trends from the brainstorm I decided that it would be best if we focused our work on improving the gamification within the app, to help improve brushing frequency. My hypothesis was that users needed a greater incentive to build and maintain healthy brushing habits.
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The main areas of focus were:
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Analyze apps that have done a good job of building habits with their users.
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Look to see if we could improve upon a gamification feature that already existed in the app before we look to build something completely new.
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Test with users to validate.
Looking Elsewhere
Since the concept of building a habit within a user base is broader then just oral care apps, I was able to expand my analysis to apps from multiple different industries. The three different types of apps that were examined were:
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Social Media
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Language Learning
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To-do lists/Task Completion
Social media apps such as instagram drive habits through technical cues and social rewards.
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The cues lead to a greater sense of belonging and access to instant gratification.
Duolingo
Duolingo has made language learning more accessible and convenient allowing people to learn anytime and anywhere.
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With its gamified approach it has made learning a new language fun and engaging.
Streaks
The Streaks app utilizes gamification through the use of fixed action rewards to build habits.
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Each time the user completes a task they get one point, if they miss a day their score goes back to zero.
Implementation
Following the completion of our brainstorming sessions and a comprehensive market analysis, I developed a strategic plan aimed at enhancing brushing frequency within the app. An overarching pattern that came from our in-depth examination of leading apps was the effective use of gamification and streaks.
Recognizing the potential of the effectiveness, I made a decision to prioritize assisting users in creating and extending their brushing streaks as a central feature of our strategy. In order to effective get users to begin a streak, we would need to develop a multifaceted approach to what we would build. Using gamification as a guide we would need to develop a stronger rewards system in order to help users begin their streak. We set the following as our three objectives in building an effective streak feature:
Streak Card
The most important aspect was developing an effective streak tracker.
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Following our brainstorming session, we determined that placing the streak as a card on the homepage was the most optimal placement.
Our rationale for this choice was from the emphasis placed on visibility and accessibility.
Drawing inspiration from the user-friendly design of Duolingo, where a user's streak is prominently displayed, we aimed to replicate this effective approach, ensuring that our users can effortlessly monitor and engage with their brushing streak directly from the homepage.
Build a challenge system
Asking users to immediately begin a brushing streak would have been too much of an ask to start with. So in order to slowly onboard a user into a brushing streak we developed challenges that would popup.
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In the beginning the challenge would be very small, only asking users to complete 2 days of brushing twice per day. Upon successfully meeting this initial milestone, we would reward them with 50 Smile Points.
Simultaneously, we'd introduce a slightly longer challenge, gradually guiding users into a more extended streak duration. This gradual progression was designed to facilitate users in organically building their brushing streak over time, rather than demanding an immediate and potentially overwhelming commitment. The goal was to empower users to embark on their habit-building journey at a pace that feels both manageable and sustainable.
Revamp Notifications
The final piece of the project was to revamp our push notification system so that it could aid users in keeping their streak.
The challenge was finding a way not to annoy users while simultaneously make sure they did not miss a brushing session.
We accomplished this by setting only three triggers for a notification.
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Sending a notification at the average time they typically brush in the morning and at night.
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Sending a reminder notification when they didn't brush at their normal time.
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Sending them a challenge notification if they did not accept the next challenge when it initially popped up.
Challenge Progress Userflow
Initial Challenge Card Designs
During the initial phase of designing the Challenge card, I looked to optimize a header design that had been utilized previously. While this offered convenience, I encountered a challenge in designing a card that seamlessly integrated both the user's streak and their overall challenge progress.
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Given the flexibility of the streak, which could exist independently of a completed challenge, I made the choice to separate the streak and challenge into distinct components. This decision not only accommodates the unique dynamics of each element but also ensures that users can effortlessly monitor and engage with their progress on both fronts.
Final Designs
Challenge Card
Streak Card
Homepage
In finalizing the design I decided on placing the streak card on top of the challenge card. The reason for this was that users may not always be in the middle of a challenge, but can still build a streak.
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As users complete more of the challenge, the streak counter will grow along side of it. I also decided on adding a persistent counter on the streak card that measures the users longest streak to date. As it could be used as another incentive to maintain their current streak.
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Once the user completes the challenge they are prompted to collect their smile points, and are asked if they would like to start the next challenge,
Conclusion
After two months of designing we were able to deliver the final designs to the external dev team for implementation. We then analyzed our users' brushing frequency for the next month to see the impact of our project. After one month we were able to establish that we reached our goal of improving the average brushing frequency from 1.3 to 1.82, surpassing our goal of increasing frequency to1.7. We were able to accomplish this by persistent brainstorming and leveraging gamification into pre-existing features.
Next Steps
Completing this project was only the first step in improving our user's brushing frequency. Helping users maintain and build healthy brushing habits will continue to be our goal. Our next steps will be to explore more deeply some of the other ideas that were generated from the brainstorm. We chose to improve the challenges and streak cards first as they were high impact features that we could implement test quickly. We aim to utilize gamification more within the app with the goal of gaining more users and building stronger brushing habits.