How to Get People to Stop Viewing Pornography

CovenantEyes, a company dedicated to helping people overcome pornography addiction, faced a unique challenge. While their paid services offered accountability monitoring for allies and partners, many potential users weren't ready to invest or disclose their struggles early in their journey. Enter the Victory App - a free solution designed to help users identify and learn about their addiction, taking the first steps towards recovery.

The journey began with extensive user research. A year-long study revealed three key aspects of the recovery path:

Clarity

Commitment

Connection

Armed with this knowledge, the team set out to create an app that would support users through each of these crucial stages.

To inform my design decisions, I studied successful apps in the habit-building and addiction recovery space, including Duolingo, Headspace, and Calm. This research unveiled common patterns such as

Progress bars

Streaks

Journaling

Personal bests

Daily check-ins

Badges

Suggested activities

Community features

Using an matrix, I organized potential features based on development effort and potential impact. This exercise helped the team focus on the "best options" that aligned with the recovery pillars.

From that initial matrix, I narrowed down on the “best options” and sort them according to how they would fit within the themes of recovery provided by user research.

My goal was to create a homepage that made users feel:

In control

Hopeful

Not alone

To achieve this, I proposed several new features:

A redesigned progress bar

A "Take The Pledge" feature

"Power Ups" for daily activities

Redesigned suggested readings

Through close collaboration with another designer, we merged two concepts - the "Check Ins" and a "Self-Reflection" - into a single, powerful feature. This became the cornerstone of our new design. And so we bagan to pursue alignment with the different teams.

One of our biggest hurdles was aligning the visions of marketing, product, and research teams. Through collaboration and a deep understanding of the company strategy, we established that retaining new users was the primary goal, benefiting both users and the company. Gaining this alignment allowed us to move forward to test several feature ideas. Validating Our Ideas: User Research

We conducted interviews with 10 advanced recovery users, presenting prototypes of our two main concepts: Power Ups and Daily Pledges. Key findings included:

The importance of community and connection

Positive reception to the emotions check-in flow

The need to refine and re-test the Power Ups feature

Strong validation for the Pledges concept

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At the end of the interviews, it was abundantly clear that the concept for Pledges was the strongest candidate for development.

Having defined the feature and the common goal. We set out to work with addiction experts that helped us refined our language and approach. We simplified commitment reasons to reduce decision paralysis and prevent from misuse, and lastly rename the feature and change copy to avoid the use of heavy-meaning words like Pledge, and so "Commit and Reflect" was born.

After multiple iterations and rounds of usability testing, we launched the "Commit and Reflect" feature. This daily commitment and self-reflection tool was designed to:

Foster a sense of community

Encourage daily reflection

Build clarity around emotions

Strengthen users' resolve to abstain from pornography

Within the first six months of launch:

Over 15,000 users had made a commitment

The adoption rate reached 26.47%

92% of users reported increased motivation to abstain from viewing pornography

Building on the success of "Commit and Reflect," we're now working on the next iteration, which will include:

- A calendar view of streaks - An improved "Feelings" questionnaire - Dynamic messaging to reduce monotony - Various bug fixes

By structuring the case study this way, we've created a narrative that flows from problem identification through solution development and implementation, highlighting key decisions and outcomes along the way. The headers now serve to guide the reader through each important stage of the process.