Brainstorming and Ideating

Learnings from our intervention study

You can read our full writeup on the intervention study we conducted here, but to quickly reiterate a couple of the main takeaways which informed our current direction:

• How much time am I spending outside? Despite the daily nudges and chatbot logging, participants still felt like they didn’t have a strong sense of how much time they were spending outside / whether they were actually spending more time outside relative to their baseline tracking. So, we wanted to think about how we might enable greater transparency around users’ “progress” in spending time outside.
• What should I do outside / who should I do it with? From peer pressure to social accountability, social factors played an important role in getting our intervention participants to actually go outside. The prompts alone weren’t enough because people wanted an activity to do outside, and we noticed that the typical “activities” in their everyday lives tend to involve social interaction. So, we wanted to think about how we might encourage people to spend more time outside in a way that involves others in their lives.

Below, we visualized the behavioral ecosystem in a connected circle map and a causal feedback loop:

Connected circle “going outside” behavioral ecosystem

Reinforcing feedback loop pulled from behavioral ecosystems connected ecosystem

Overview of brainstormed ideas

Based on the learnings from the data we collected via our intervention study and post-intervention interviews, we came up with the following 34 ideas (generated separately, then evaluated together 😉).

Initial ideas, grouped by general theme

We then went through a couple of iterations of chunking (first by “timeline,” then by the general theme. The latter is screenshotted above). The ✨ mark the rows corresponding to the general buckets of ideas that we thought might be the most promising, given our current understanding of our target audience.

10 sketches of our top ideas

We then narrowed down our top ten ideas from the ✨ marked rows, and sketched them out to flesh them out further.

• A platform where a team works together towards completing a shared weekly outside-time goal
• The user receives a forest visualization and gets an actual tree planted after achieving certain outside-time milestones
• The user unlocks new songs on Spotify while spending time outside
• A simple notification that nudges the user to step outside whenever there is an incoming call
• A location-based, outdoor narrative walk that pairs a story to specific locations
• A calendar that visualizes and keeps track of progress
• A map that gives location-based activity suggestions for the user whenever they step outside
• A small adorable avatar that levels up when the user goes outside
• A gamified, PokémonGo style platform where users collect virtual avatars/experiences while spending time outside
• A platform that connects users to other people in their community with the same outdoor interests

Fleshed out prototype

After completing sketches for our top 10 ideas, we decided to develop a prototype that focuses on leveraging social motivation to go outside and enables greater transparency around tracking users’ “progress.”

User-set, interval-based tracker for the amount of time spent outside (Fig 1 and 2); Instant (mini) celebration! (Fig 3)

Hamburger menu unfolded (Fig 4); Larger reward for meeting weekly goals (Fig 5); Enabling users to make this decision based on their own motivations (Fig 6)

Weekly progress tracker (horizontal swipe to switch views) (Fig 7), Collection mechanic — reunite all the blobbie blobs! (Fig 8), Special set of blob characters to encourage social interaction and peer-based accountability (Fig 9)