Quit
A mobile app that empowers users to control their addictions through community, personalization, and supplementing negative triggers with positive reminders.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Addiction treatment is frequently ineffective, and its benefits fleeting; People often relapse without the proper support.
How do we know this is a real problem?
Traditional 12-step or counselling-only approach without biochemical support only have a 15–25% recovery rate after 5 years.
Why is it important to solve?
Those with substance dependencies can easily lose everything that once held meaning in their lives including work, friends and relationships.
Who are our users?
People suffering with varying severity of addictive substance dependency.
The Problem
How might we help those suffering with addiction change those habitual behaviours?
User Goal
Reduce, if not quit unhealthy addictions.
Research
After doing some research, I came up with a list of some reasons people had difficulty quitting, these include
Boredom
Stress
Unobtainable/intimidating Goals
Lack of motivation
Bad habit = good feeling
No Support
Discouragement
Long term goals seem distant
Guilt
Much time and research has been put into the High Effort problems and they require long-term commitment, and often external support to influence. I chose to target the Low Effort problems with the intention to help people with the early phase of quitting and to increase their likelihood of getting to the High Effort problems when they are mentally equipped with the right tools.
I began unpacking each of those Low Effort problems in order to find plausible solutions one-by-one.
Lack of motivation
a. Access to a community that cares and has been through the same thing. Those who share vices often chat and bad habits can create a community of people who pass the time in the same way. Consider subsidizing this behaviour with a positive community.
b. Provide a readily accessible place that houses all of the necessary resources needed when combatting addiction.
Long term goals seem distant
a. Set out clear recovery journeys for people
b. Track users progress
No Support
a. Suggest goals built for longevity
b. Divide big goals up into small digestible steps
Unobtainable/intimidating Goals
a. Provide easy obtainable goals
b. Remove the cognitive weight of adding those goals
c. Give the users a starting point or baseline
Establishing a Product Goal
After laying out this network of problems and known solutions, I was able to look for broad patterns and boil that information down into four key solutions that target the underlaying causes of addiction. These are the traits that will be necessary in the final product. With this information I was then able to discern a digestible product goal:
Harness the emotional cues supplied by addiction and use them to create a personalized and effortless experience—an experience that sticks.
The Design
The initial problem statement was: How might we help those suffering with addiction change those habitual behaviours? After prioritizing my solutions I have hypothesized that the solution will include:
A way for people to set their own personal intentions
Access to a support community
Positive enforcement of initial goals and intentions
Supplementing bad habitual triggers with positive support
The Logistics
When considering what the solution will include, and in what environment people might be interacting with their addictive behavioural triggers I decided that this experience will be most impactful on a mobile device.
Real quick: Web app vs. Native app?
In this scenario a native app makes more sense because a native app is totally compatible with the device's hardware and native features, and future designs could potentially integrate/utilize the device health tracking capabilities to give users a more personalized experience.
Mapping the experience.
Building an experience that gets the users to the meat of the experience with all the tools in hand they need to succeed with as little friction as possible.
Creating the flows
User flows (primary goal: reduce friction early on to get users to the meat of the content)
Testing it out
Testing out what that initial hypothesized solution would look like (original hypothesis includes: Personalized intentions, Support/community, Positive enforcement/reminders of intentions, supplementing bad habitual triggers with positive support)
From Here
Bring flows to high fidelity to create delight for the user.
Success
What does success look like from here
Did we solve the problem?
Do users successfully enter their own intentions, and navigate through the onboarding experience with little to no friction?
Are people using it as intended?
Do users reach their goal of quitting? Measure the frequency of “craving” to “used” interactions. Do those change over time?
How can we make it better?
Can we integrate native health tracking technology to better personalize peoples experiences? Can we give users more directed support by giving them access to more targetted help? Can we work with community groups already in place to better individuals support networks?