Opportunity Space
HabitAware is a Minnesota-based company founded in 2015 with the intent of helping those who live with body-focused repetitive behaviors (or BFRB’s) become aware of these subconscious behaviors and give them a tool to begin combating their behaviors. BFRB’s manifest in many ways, the most notable of which are hair pulling, nail biting, and face picking among others.
The first iteration of such a tool came as a wearable — a wristband with an app that could be trained to detect motions that would lead the wearer to engage in the behavior they struggle with and provide a haptic response, bringing a subconscious action into the realm of consciousness. Awareness is obviously only one element to changing an ingrained behavior, and as such, HabitAware grew its offerings to include an online community, family resources, master courses, and peer coaching.
However, a gap appeared in the users’ perception of the overall offerings from HabitAware. Feedback of frustration that the wearable in and of itself was ineffective in treating BFRB’s created awareness that users weren’t getting the full picture of what’s being offered, and as such, what’s entailed in the treatment of BFRB’s.
It became clear to my team almost immediately the the focus of the website revolves around the KEEN2 wristband, and that more could be done to highlight the additional communities and services being connected as part of the overall HabitAware ecosystem.
My Final Contributions
As part of a group effort to enhance awareness of supplemental services in the user experience of HabitAware’s website, my focus was on the digital artwork that appears in ad spaces of various places online, including websites, music streaming apps, and social media sites.
The scope of the project was somewhat broad, but it made sense to use existing imagery and iconography to create the pieces. I used the icons with the avatars of people and expanded their meaning from simply depicting the BFRB (body-focused repetitive behavior) to dovetail into the community and coaching aspects of the site, humanizing the technology piece that’s prominently displayed.
Artwork In
The Wild
The ads were presented to the client in a way that would support their goal on various places online as the user is scrolling.
Ideation
Following a review of the existing site and an interview with the cofounder, our team entered research mode!
In my capacity, I was curious about the human element of the disconnect. As people, why are we resistant to change? How big of a part was that playing when considering the fullness of the treatments being offered by HabitAware?
I wanted to humanize the experience overall, making it easier for people to see themselves in the services in addition to using the wristband to bring awareness to their behaviors.
The User Journey
As a team, we wanted to make sure we had a full view of the user’s experience, from the moment they discovered HabitAware to the point where they’re considering re-upping their service, and even becoming brand ambassadors and evangelists! We used a simple table to illustrate the the user experience from left to right across the top along with facets of each part of the user (and by the organization eventually) down the y-axis on the left.
My Learnings & Next Steps
This group project entailed some broad strokes, and it took a lot of coordination, organization, and planning to create different components to a whole.
For me, this became a reminder that everything we do is about people. HabitAware had an opportunity to refocus their message to the human components of their offerings — the peer-to-peer counseling, the coaching, and reinforcing the most difficult aspect: It takes effort and time to change a habit.
Using their own iconography and expanding it to relay a message that there are others out there like them, the very imagery of the people balanced with the technology piece of the program, that there is hope.
My next steps in the outside messaging piece of this project would be to include brief yet meaningful testimonials in some of the artwork, using quotes from people who’ve been through the program, and then to either include actual photos of the people using it or expand the avatars to continue that humanized look and feel.