Hi, my name is Horia 👋

I am a Senior Product Designer at Sweatcoin & Sweat Economy and currently the Lead Designer of Play Team 🎮, a team focused on gamification.

In this case study, I will go over one of Sweatcoin’s core features — Daily Boost, and how we explored a new direction for it with the goal of providing our users with a fresh and more engaging experience.

Curious? Cool, let’s go then!

First things first  —  our existing Daily Boost 🚶‍♂️

As mentioned, Daily Boost is one of Sweatcoin’s main features and it helps our users engage in a healthy daily walking habit while also earning extra Sweatcoins.

The duration of this activity is 20 minutes, in which users are encouraged to walk 2,200 steps or more.

Why 2,200?

Experts recommend —a moderate-paced walk a day —  to improve your health. You can read more about this here

A short deep dive into our current Daily Boost

a) Purpose The message is clear — create a healthy habit so users get their hearts pumping for 20 minutes daily.

b) Problem While interviewing our users, we identified two core areas that we need to address:

• Users cannot reach the 2200 steps so they feel that the goal is too hard.

• Active users are not as challenged so the goal feels easy for them

• Once a user completes the Daily boost, the next day it feels the same so there is no new motivation to keep going.

Based on our user interviews and some internal reviews, we created the following hypothesis:

“By creating an experience where users feel rewarded for any achievement during the experience but also have an extra incentive to complete it and come back every day we will drive the bases to create a healthy daily habit.”

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A new creative direction 🎨

With the hypothesis defined, we took the time to explore the new direction for Daily Boost.

What was needed for this?

A strong and creative metaphor and a satisfying end goal for the user.

With that in mind, we explored a few creative directions but the most satisfying and fun concept resulted from our game expert & product owner, Alberto — Piggy Bank & Hammer.

And with this, the Piggy concept was slowly taking shape!

Piggy Boost —  how does it work

In essence, the core functionality of the boost stays the same — users will be asked to walk 2,200 steps in 20 minutes or less but in a more gamified and engaging experience.

Gameplay

While walking, users will have 5 milestones, each containing one Sweatcoin and once they reach 2,200 steps (the final milestone), they will unlock the hammer needed to break open the Piggy where their accumulated Sweatcoins are being stored.

You can see this flow here 👇

Rewarding users that didn’t finish the Boost in time ✨

Additionally, it’s important to understand that on certain days our users may not reach this goal, and the last thing we want is for them to get discouraged.

That's why with the Piggy Boost we introduced the possibility of saving your Sweatcoins for the next day.

If they don’t reach their boost goal, users can simply save their accumulated coins inside the Piggy and come back the next day, redo the Boost, and aim to complete it. Once they finalize the challenge, with the unlocked hammer they will be able to smash open their Sweatcoins (from the previous and current day) and store them in their wallet.

Pretty satisfying, right? 🧡

Smash open the Piggy!

Before we go into the final step of this flow, it’s important to note once piece of feedback we got at the beginning of the project:

“Who would want to break such a cute Piggy Bank?”

The answer: no one.

On this last screen is the part where I had the most fun designing the animation where users would unlock their hard-earned Sweatcoins while also maintaining a cute and fun visual “smash” UI.

To wrap it up,

Piggy Boost was a fun exploration to work on, something we are currently testing with our users to understand if this improvement gives them extra motivation to go out for a 20-minute walk.

From our recent A/B test, most users “prefer the new version over the old boost” & “felt that Piggy is cute and liked the new way of interacting”. 👀

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Gamification  —  a whole new design experience 🕹️

For the last year almost, being part of our Play Team and the lead designer on the gamification project has been not only a challenging experience but also a highly rewarding one.

I felt more creative than ever in my new position and while the Piggy Boost was just the start of our journey as a team, it was the right project to kickstart our gamification vision for both Sweatcoin and our SWEAT Wallet.

Excited to showcase more projects in the near future! 

It’s been quite a wild and fun year so far. 🧨

Did you enjoy this case study? 🔥

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