Ziggle: Goal Setting and Accountability

Anushka Garg

UX Researcher

UX Designer

Product Designer

Figma

Problem

Did you know only 20% people set goals, but only 30% of them are able to achieve them.

I encountered this fact in a research article by Reliableplant. This made me draw a correlation to what I have observed among my friends and peers. Many have a practice to set daily goals but they fail to achieve them successfully. They either put them off due to loosing interest or make excuses to not do them at the time. This results in constant procrastination, delay in tasks and demotivates the person.

“How do I track my progress everyday"

“Shit! I forgot to work on my goal today.”

“There are so many things I want to do! How do I manage?”

“I need someone to nag me like my mum to complete my work. Haha”

“Ugh! How boring. I don’t want to work on this task anymore.”

Goal

Enable users to clearly define and articulate their goals.

Provide a structure to help users in setting their goals. Incorporate features such as goal categorization, descriptions, and deadlines to ensure clarity.

Foster a sense of accountability and support through buddy interactions.

Implement buddy pairing features where users can connect with friends or peers to share their goals and progress. Enable communication channels. for buddies to provide encouragement, feedback, and celebrate achievements together.

Solution

Goals for personal and professional growth

Create a goal, add tasks under it and assign to it an accountability buddy!

Divide your goal in different tasks (each task with different checkpoints) to easily track and manage your progress. Assign a buddy to your goal to stay accountable to your progress.

Get a Buddy to help you

Connect and chat with other users to help you stay accountable!

Discover new buddies to connect with. View their number of connections and rewards. Chat with your buddies, share your progress and motivations.

Gamify your experience!

A reward system to engage you, customizable profile avatars, an in app calendar for daily schedule!

A gamifying reward system for your achievements to motivate you. Choose an avatar from a wide of selection to create your own identity and maintain anonymity. A calendar to view your daily tasks and checkpoints.

The Process

White Paper Research

I started with scouring the internet (mainly Google scholar) to conduct white paper research on the topic. My objective was to find facts and evidences highlighting the problem as well some possible solutions to the problem. Fortunately, I found a study by the Dominican University with several interesting insights:

People who wrote goals down, made a plan, and enlisted friends to help them by sending regular progress reports succeeded closer to 75% of the time.

Specific goals matter 📑

The more specific your goals are the more motivated you become. Creating short-term tasks that fit into larger, long-term goals helps a lot.

Accountability matters🥁

Commitments and sharing weekly progress report makes you 76% more like to achieve a goal. Scheduled accountability can be a game changer.

Analyzing market and Competitors

It is a very crowded market! Let’s analyze!

Looking at the popular players within the space, I discovered a similar catalogue of feature offering being followed around Goal Tracking.

What do my users think? + Key Insights

Interviews with 5 participants revealed a common theme of delay due to procrastination and short term gratification.

I conducted, semi-structured interviews with target users to validate my research findings and further understand how people currently set goals, their motivations and challenges. I concluded 3 key insights from the interactions:

#1. Short term achievements delights users and makes them strive for more.

“I only set short term goals cause they are easy to accomplish.”

#2. Having a like minded buddy by their side helps them stay motivated.

“Its hard to keep working towards a goal when you don’t see an end and get confused about what to do at times.”

#3. Dividing a goal into short term tasks can make it less overwhelming.

“Procrastination and loosing motivation are my biggest enemy. I need someone to constantly nag at me to complete my tasks.”

Empathizing with my user

Meet Taylor, a 22 year old master’s student who is also working part time in a marketing company!

Steps towards a successful journey - Storyboard cum Instruction board

The 4 steps winning formula that one should follow to achieve their goal successfully - This forms the basis for Ziggle!

This was created on the basis of the white paper research and the data obtained from the users.

Set Smart Goals!

Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Write your goals down!

List your goals to keep yourself accountable and break them down to make it less overwhelming.

Find an accountability partner!

Find someone who can regularly check in on your progress and hold you accountable.

Visualize achieving your goal!

Visualize your progress with each task completed. Motivate yourself with rewards.

Designing Ziggle

Site Map

Getting a clear and intuitive view of the structure of the app.

From the research and requirements observed thanks to empathy mapping, I derived a basic structure of how Ziggle is going to look and function like. The aim was to provide users with an easy to navigate and relatable app with all the required features.

Exploration

Sketching out the first visuals of the idea using Figjam!

I sketched different flows of how the user will navigate through the application - Goals, Tasks, Calendar, Buddy discover, Chats, Notification, creating a new goal and profile.

Testing and Iteration

Lo-Fi Prototype for first round of usability testing!

Before moving onto hi-fi design, I decided to test this app with real users. I wanted to gather insights on user behavior, interaction and valuable feedback for further improvement.

Altering my Design

3 Major improvements from the insights gathered during testing!

Removing Social Logins

This decision was done to enforce anonymity and to encourage users to establish their own identity out of their social circle.

Making reminders more humane and motivational.

Adding personalized messages from the assigned goal buddy to remind users about their tasks and cheer them up. Promotes a relationship of trust and familiarity between buddies.

Status filter for goals and tasks

This decision was done to enforce anonymity out of their social circles and give a chance to users establish their own identity with customized avatar related to app’s theme.

STYLE GUIDE

Hi-Fi Design

Sign Up + Onboarding

Goals and Tasks + Calendar

Buddy Discover + Buddy Chats

Profile + Notifications + New Goal

Final Takeaways

Some valuable lessons.

It saves a lot of time to conduct a usability study before hi-fi design!

I was concerned whether users will be able to understand my rough wireframes but I was very wrong. No wonder they assumptions are very different from reality. I got a lot of valuable feedback for my designs that helped me adjust and make improvements.

Empathize with your users!

For an app that helps user achieve their goals, it was important to understand their source of motivation and frustration. Creating an empathy map made it easier for me to visualize that and make sense of my user’s situation.

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Posted Aug 10, 2024

A mobile app that helps young adults set, track and achieve their goals while staying accountable to their progress with the help of a buddy.

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