As I’ve mentioned, Benchd v0 was pretty much done and sitting in app store testing. Buttt it’s just not what I wanted after revisiting the project. Soulless, too gamified, too many gradients - however, still the right direction! To give you more context, here are all the screens I had in the app. Let’s break down each section and restructure for our new design!

I actually think the onboarding is in a healthy spot. If you recall from our research, onboarding averaged to ~15 screens. There is a psychology that the more you get users to “commit” early on, the higher likelihood they’ll convert on the payment screen.

Since I’m not looking to charge for Benchd, I don’t feel the need to inundate them with questions - The current flow is at 8 steps. Howeverrrr, the point of the app is to beat them to their urges. So we do that by asking questions like:

Imagine the scenario - there is a big NFL Sunday slate coming up - I have this database that says a cohort of users likes to gamble on the NFL and usually bet in the morning to get ahead of the games. I can use a notification to urge them to seek help or have a distraction so they aren’t focused on gambling.

The other goal of Benchd is to replace a gambling habit with better, self-improving habits. The home tab is supposed to be clean and easy to consume. A main feature of sobriety apps is having the savings or days sober clock - I combined that and figured that’s all I need to show. This should all stay the same - but the biggest change I want to make is the XP feature.

The concept was built around rewarding good behavior and letting the user “level” up. A classic gamification model for many apps - all the best ones do it! It consists of a group of tasks like:

The list goes on - and that’s the problem. This initial flow is too daunting. If you let the user try everything, they’ll do nothing. The fix for this should be a model that learns what the user is most interested in OR building a quiz in the app to find their interest and gear their new habits towards things they actually enjoy. It takes 21 days to build a habit - I have to make sure it is something they want to stick with.

One of the biggest features of the app is allowing users to distract themselves. Diverting attention from gambling into a harmless (and often beneficial) task is key to breaking addiction. This section introduces:

This may actually be my favorite part of the initial design. Providing a spot for users to feel comfortable and work on themselves is so important. The one addition I want to make to this section is pointing users towards human help or therapists - Something I think Sunflower does really well.

Speaking of distractions - still doing my best to dedicate time to this! Next week I hope to talk to my design buddy and get some ideation onto the board. I’m not putting timelines on this because then it feels like a stressor and not a good project - but at some point, I need to turn it up!