The Spotlight Challenge
Long-term Virgin Pulse ↗ clients were growing tired of running step challenges for their employees. Clients wanted to utilize the popularity of challenges to approach nuanced topics like mindfulness, sleep, and nutrition.
Client
Virgin Pulse
Responsibilities
UX/UI, user research
Project details
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Virgin Pulse offers employee wellbeing programs to businesses. Virgin Pulse offers engagement programs and rewards to motivate participation.
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In challenges, employees compete against one another to track the most physical activity. Within the experience, users view their activity, check their rank, and chat with one another.
Collaborators
Product Management, Engineering, UX Design, Product Leadership, Client Success
Research Methods
Client interviews, user interviews, concept testing, surveys, diary studies
Platforms
Web app, mobile app, administrative interfaces
Tools
Sketch, Abstract, InVision, Miro, JIRA, Confluence, User Interviews
Until 2020, Virgin Pulse’s only corporate challenge offering had been step-based challenges. Long-term clients were growing tired of running the same challenges each year, and were asking for new challenge types. Clients wanted to offer their employees challenges that focused on mindfulness, mental health, financial wellbeing, nutrition, and more.
After joining Virgin Pulse, I was assigned to work with the Challenges team. The team was currently wrapping up development of a v1 alpha of the challenge. The team’s new PM and I were tasked with bringing this alpha to the finish line.
Alpha Testing
We wrapped up development of the alpha and ran internal usability tests with colleagues who were most interested in the Spotlight Challenge.
How the alpha worked:
Users joining the challenge would choose from one of three physical activities—yoga, steps, or activity minutes. Upon selecting an activity, users were assigned a goal to compete against for the duration of the experience. This goal was calculated based on previously recorded activity data in our app.
Users would be given a cumulative goal that correlated with the number of days of the challenge. Their goal was to hit 100% of that goal before the challenge ended.
Users would be ranked on based on their progress towards their goals—users who hit 100% of their goal would be in first place, users who hit 99% of their goal would be in second place, etc.
Alpha testing uncovered a few big problems with the challenge experience, including:
The team had relied on fitness tracker activity as the challenge’s data source, which did align with the long-term vision of this non-activity challenge
The experience was very passive
Users weren't able to create or adjust their challenge goal, which many expressed interest in upon learning they had to go with what the platform recommended.
There was no content to support users through the challenge experience
Artifacts from various collaborative efforts that guided our reassessment of the project’s goals and outcomes.
A Fresh Start
We went back to the drawing board with a lot of great takeaways, and worked on building a new experience that would better meet the needs of our clients and users.
To help ensure v2 of the Spotlight Challenge was meeting these needs we:
Held client interviews to understand what our clients were looking for from a non-activity challenge
Had more frequent design workshops with internal stakeholders, developers, and content team to balance creating an awesome experience and providing reasonable timelines for development
Ran multiple usability sessions with our users to understand their comprehension of a non-activity challenge experience and how they would want to compete in this type of challenge
Ran a diary study over two weeks to test the long-term success of the challenge
Diary Study Findings
Highly motivated users had no trouble hitting their challenge goal. Those who were less motivated often hit a plateau and did not reach their goal.
Motivation trended downwards during the course of the challenge, primarily because users who weren’t able to reach their goals lost steam.
Product Launch
After months of work, collaboration, and testing, we finally launched our first Spotlight Challenge with a focus on mindfulness. Our clients were excited to have a new challenge experience to offer their employees, and were looking forward to future Spotlight Challenge launches that would include topics like sleep, financial wellbeing, and more.
The Spotlight Challenge experience:
When joining the challenge, users go through an onboarding flow that gives them details on the challenge’s subject matter, asks them to give a baseline of their current activity status, and allows them to set a goal for the duration of the challenge.
On the main challenge landing page, users track their data towards their challenge goal. Users can also explore challenge tips—which gives them ideas on how to succeed in the challenge—and view the various third-party programs that they can use to further help them succeed in the challenge.
Users are able to view a detailed breakdown of their data on the progress screen, allowing them to see trends in their progress or simply see how far they have come since the challenge began.
Users can view the leaderboard and see how they were progressing in the challenge compared to their colleagues.
Users can chat with their colleagues and share tips on how to succeed, their progress, and more.
Roadmap Items
While our launch was largely a success, we recognized that there were a few areas to improve as we continued to iterate on the experience.
Our list of enhancements included
Create a more robust notification system to remind users to check back in to the challenge. Our diary study showed us that users who forgot to check into the challenge were unmotivated, so we wanted to ensure that users would be reminded to return to the experience.
Give users the ability to adjust their goal after a certain time period. Some of our users in our long-term diary study lost motivation after realizing they wouldn’t reach their goal before the challenge ended, so we wanted to find a way to allow users to adjust their goal at some point in the experience.