My Nano Goals App
Changing cognitive behaviors.
Overview
Making new goals is something we all do either consciously or unconsciously. How can we make goals work for us by changing daily tasks into longterm habits? The aim of this experiment was to create an app experience that allowed users to track their goals.
Role & Duration
Product Designer | Nano
Research, Information Architecture, Interaction, Wireframes, Prototyping
Jan 2020
Problem
Setting goals is easy, reaching that goal can sometimes be hard. How can we create a system where users can track their goals to eventually form new lifestyle habits?
How Habits are Formed
Habits are formed by the constant completion of what is called a Habit Loop. A Habit loop consists of a Cue, a Routine, and a Reward. Habit Loop research is largely spearheaded by Dr. Ann Graybiel at MIT. She and her team study the basal ganglia and all its structures to understand its importance. Habit Loops have a 3 part process:
The Cue: tells your brain to go into automatic mode and let a behavior unfold.
The Routine: or the behavior itself
The Reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember
Brainpower
Habit-making behaviors come from a part of the brain called the Basal Ganglia. Decision-making behaviors come from a part of the brain called the Prefrontal Cortex.
As soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the prefrontal lobe essentially goes to sleep and the behavior moved to the basal ganglia.
For humans, this is to our advantage as this system allow your to functionally do something without thinking about it too much. This means you have created habit, leaving you open to focus on other things.
The Competition
There are plenty of apps that work to help people identify and maintain goals. After identifying some of the top apps, I detailed some of the features I thought would be nice to add to the experience. Our Intern Henry Craft put together a Competitive Matrix to get an understanding of each of the company’s backgrounds.
Fabulous
Set a goal based on time of day.
Done
Set any habit based on a list of ideas
Remente
Asks users to measure satisfaction.
Productive
Shows user’s task in streaks
Paring Down
When I joined Nano, the plan was to have the goals experience be a single feature part of a larger app. With a little research I was able to demonstrate that this feature is far too big to be part of an app and should be an app on it’s own. From there, I laid out potential features for an app experience.
Potential Features
Create your own goal outside of courses/tracks/curricula. For goals that aren’t about health (physical) or wellbeing (mental) but social.
Have a number of small goals equal the completion of a larger goal so that people feel like there is a means to an end. Here, however, we give them the opportunity to elect back into the same goal again or make it a permanent goal.
Goal Pivot - My goal has changed, I now want to focus on xyz
How aggressive the user wants to pursue a goal - Progressively harder, Easier, No Change, None at All
Feature Mapping
With the help of the Product team, we identified a full list of features we wanted and started to map features by version. We measured by Value and Effort to understand what kind experience we would be able to build as an MVP.
Annotated Wireframes
The Final Solution
The solution was to create an app with trackable, curated guides for user goals. Users can choose from specific guides based on their interests or make their own custom goals. We started with wireframes to prove the concept and get buy-in from stakeholders. The MVP we created was used as an experiment to prove or disprove many of the key features we planned to roll out with the larger experience.
