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2 min read

Old Habits Die Hard

I recently ran a survey across a broad swath of people across the US (using Mechanical Turk) to try to understand people’s health habits. Interestingly, 66% of respondents believe that setting daily habit targets (e.g. walking 8,000 steps) would work better for improving their health than setting long term goals. Yet, when asked about their biggest obstacle to being healthy, 70% pointed to inconsistent follow-through with their habits.

This presents a paradox: most people see the value of daily habit-setting but struggle with consistency. So, how do popular health apps try to solve this?

  1. Do nothing. Interestingly, most popular health & wellness apps, like MyFitnessPal, LifeSum, and LoseIt focus on calorie tracking rather than actively guiding users to build healthy eating habits.
  1. Streaks. This is the most common way to encourage habits and create loss aversion. This is used by apps across the spectrum - Apple Fitness, Fitbit, Headspace, WaterLlama, and Duolingo. In these apps, users have to meet a daily goal to maintain their streak. The goal can be to complete an action (e.g., complete a meditation session or a language lesson), or to hit a metric (e.g., active minutes or steps). Missing a day breaks the streak, which creates a strong psychological nudge to keep going.
  1. Journey. Some apps show the user’s journey and the next steps in the path to encourage them to continue their habits. Health apps design these as ‘plans’ (e.g., couch-to-5k plan), but is otherwise not very common. This is prevalent in education apps and games. Apps like Duolingo and Brilliant combine the streaks & journey concepts really well.
  1. Social obligation. I couldn’t find apps that did this well, but a good way to form a habit is to pre-commit to an activity with friends or family. This could be a group fitness class, a sport, or even a morning walk with friends. The fixed time schedule combined with the social accountability (i.e., your buddy will not have a tennis partner if you don’t show up) helps build new habits and makes them enjoyable.

There are other techniques such as awarding badges (Apple Fitness, Fitbit) that apps use as rewards for maintaining habits; and implementing monetary stakes (StickK, HealthyWage) that tap into loss aversion by asking you to wager money to meet your goals.

Have I missed a technique used in an app that has helped you form a habit?