Behavioural Design Case Study: Headspace
While Consumer App Designers have begun to increasingly use the understanding of human psychology to make their Apps more ‘effective’ in achieving their goals, its ultimate impact on users’ life is debatable. Rare are the Apps that genuinely attempt to do good to users and thus positively impact society at large. In other words, rare and few are Apps which can be said to belong to the ‘Facilitator’ quadrant of the Manipulation Matrix model (to be elaborated soon) proposed by Nir Eyal — A pioneer in the literature related to Habit-forming products.
Headspace app is one of such rare Apps and is the topic of this article. However before explaining the term ‘Facilitator’ let us quickly get to know what Headspace is.
About Headspace
Headspace is a Self-Care/Wellness App aimed to help individuals improve the quality of their life practicing simple meditation techniques. They also have dedicated focus for improving sleep quality and iPad version of their App also includes guided physical training exercises. Having been a regular user of the App for a couple of years now (although with periods of inactivity) I can testify for the truth of their tagline ‘Meditation made simpler’. However neither its meditation nor its fun UX and quirky animations are the topic of this article. We will focus only on several persuasive design elements behind the App that makes it very effective.
The Facilitator
Nir Eyal provides the Manipulation Matrix as a simple decision-making tool to answer if behavioural manipulation attempted by an App can be considered ethical or warranted.
To use it, the maker needs to answer two questions:
- Will the product help users materially improve their lives?
- Would I use the product myself?
While it is beyond argument that meditation can materially (and more so spiritually) improve users’ life, the most interesting aspect is that Headspace’s founder Andy Puddicombe was an ordained and a practicing Monk in Tibetian Buddhist Tradition. The App seems to be a tremendous exhibition of deep gratitude to the benefits of meditation that was experienced and a deep desire to share the benefit with the rest of the world.
Let us unravel its persuasive elements one by one.
Endowed Progress with ‘My Stats’
As part of the user’s Profile section in the App, one gets to see a dashboard of statistics with prominence given to the current continuous streak.
I have witnessed myself getting into meditation cushion using sheer will power against an unwilling mind just to not break a streak once the streak had been a couple of weeks long. I have also seen myself taking a shorter duration meditation on a tiring or a busy day so as to not break the streak. I think this behaviour is perfectly acceptable and probably even an expectation of the App designers. To turn an activity into a habit, one needs to rigorously train the body-mind continuum by repeating the activity at expected frequency as much without breaks. The App encourages exactly that. Also into a long streak, I have also observed attempting longer meditation sessions to increase the average duration.
This effect is called Endowed Progress Effect which notes that
“When people feel they have made some progress towards a goal then they will become more committed to continued effort towards achieving the goal.”
Underlying mechanism behind this effect can be explained as follows. People experience a certain dissonance when they are about to lose the accrued progress and they make additional effort (invest will power) to avoid the same. This dissonance could be considered as an evolutionary feedback mechanism to the individual to not let invested effort go in vain and preserve self-esteem in doing so. Over the course of evolution of life, an individual’s opinion of himself and people’s (staying as part of the tribe) opinion of him acted as a currency that provided the individual with better reproductive and survival advantages (More on it in a separate article probably).
Back to the App, I also noticed that it is relatively lenient in counting the streak i.e if you miss just a day it does not break the streak. This is also important considering that the loss of endowed progress or lack of apparent progress can have a demotivating effect. The App and User are both better served if the streak is not lost.
Sharing
Not missing out on something most Apps do, Headspace also enables the user to share his progress. A fun creative with exact streak count gets created which can be shared easily.
Social Psychology findings show that an act of sharing an achievement can work as a public display of commitment whereby the user becomes more committed to the cause. Once a commitment is publicly announced, not staying true to that creates a dissonance and the individual makes additional effort to avoid the same. This dissonance can also be tied back to evolutionary feedback mechanisms in pursuit of high self esteem we earlier spoke about and also pursuit of higher public-esteem in this case.
Milestone Goals and Badges
Seemingly taken from books of Game designers, the Headspace App depicts milestone progress by unlocking Badges (Achievement Symbols in the parlance of gamification). Milestones in the early stages are intentionally closer and grow farther very soon. This gives the user a much-needed sense of progress and accomplishment in the early days until he finds the exercise itself to be intrinsically rewarding.
Speaking about the underlying mechanism, Badges act as socially accepted and recognised achievement symbols to advertise the beholder’s capabilities or achievement thereby contributing to higher self and public esteem.
Another interesting thing to note here is the lack of mechanisms to share the badges. The App seems to intentionally downplay peer-to-peer comparison which is also evident in the next feature we are going to look at.
The ‘Buddy’ Board
While Headspace App has built support to enable friends to help each other to stay on track, it is far from being a leaderboard. The user just gets to see who all of his friends used Headspace that day. It does not show exactly what were the activities or streak counts of his buddies.
Interactions are also limited to sending a few templated messages like ‘You are doing great!’, ‘you deserve some Headspace today!’ which surprisingly does not even seem to create a push notification to the recipient.
The App tries to harness the innate human need for connectedness and emotional support. The ability to create strong social connections provided our ancestors a survival advantage and the emotion that triggered the wanting for belonging (protein which caused it to happen, to be exact) was thus favoured by evolution.
However the App seems to have chosen only positive aspects of social connections and leave out peer-to-peer comparison that usually results.
A surprise reward
I received the below notification ten days before the 90 days milestone
Though I had not paid much attention to it, the surprise turned out to be attractive enough: A three months trial access to the App which I could gift someone.
While the user gets nothing for himself, I still see how gratifying it is to really see meaningful difference done to someone’s life (think Social Service/NGO). Thus I would still consider this form of a ‘Surprise Reward’, a commonly seen gamification lever.
Gentle like breath
According to me, the most beautiful aspect of the App in its usage of persuasive elements to engineer positive behaviour, is it’s intentional downplaying of the very elements. The gamification aspects used by the App are very subtle, unobtrusive, and buried deeper. When analysed through Octalysis Tool this comes out clearly as a ‘White Hat/Right Brain Design’.
The tool also makes following suggestion:
“Your experience is heavily focused on White Hat Core Drives, which means users feel great and empowered. The drawback is that users do not have a sense of urgency to commit the desired actions. Think about implementing light Black Hat Techniques to add a bit more thrill to the experience. Also, your Right Brain Core Drives are much stronger than Left Brain Ones, which means your experience is much more intrinsic in nature. This is great because users genuinely enjoy your experience. You can also consider adding in more Left Brain Game Techniques to add more feeling of accomplishment, more ingrained ownership, and more controlled limitations to spice up the experience.”
I believe this positioning of persuasion elements is perfectly justified because this App is for developing meditation as a habit. The very goal and technique of mindfulness (the style of meditation taught in the App) is to nonchalantly witness the vicissitudes of the mind and not to be carried away by thoughts and emotions, as against to participating in a roller coaster ride of dopamine rush which most gamification designs aim to take users through.
I am obliged to say this App is an exemplary display of a well crafted behavioural design while also being a magnificent contribution to acceleration of human evolution.
Disclaimer
1. Ideas discussed here solely represent the thoughts and beliefs of the author and have nothing to do with organizations he is part of.
2. Ideas represented here are at best relative truths. The Ultimate Truth is beyond words. Tat Tvam Asi.
