The Challenge: The dripdrop app aims to develop healthy mental fitness habits in tweens. Use a barter system and gamification principles to encourage tweens to watch bite-sized video lessons and take small steps towards improving their mental fitness. As the lead product designer, it was my responsibility to work directly with the founder, key stakeholders, users, and our dev team to deliver on this promise.

The Strategy: The first step of developing any habit is always the hardest. It's even harder when you're a parent trying to get your pre-teen to take action! Using knowledge about motivation from psychology, the premise of the dripdrop app is that we can kickstart kids into action through incentives that are meaningful to them. By providing extrinsic rewards—such as quality time with dad, staying up late, or a gift card—parents can get their kids to take the first step towards a healthy mindset. Over time, kids learn that taking care of themselves feels good and the intrinsic motivation system takes over.

User Insights: Two critical insights to come out of UX research were that 1) many kids shared a device with other family members, and 2) kids are not able to create a family account but they may be the ones who instigate a family to sign up. These insights allows us to create new features that addressed the issues at hand.

In the first case, I designed a feature to make it easy for families to share the same device and easily switch back and forth from one user account to another. For the second issue, I built a no-code workflow that enabled kids to fill in a form on the main marketing site that would trigger an app invitation to be sent to their parents. As this solution was built and maintained outside the app by non-developers, it increased our efficiency and lowered costs.

Working Prototype: To test out our assumptions and get additional user feedback, I built a high-fidelity prototype using no-code tools. Connecting Webflow, Video Ask, Shopify, and Yotpo Loyalty points, I was able to recreate the entire end-to-end experience where kids could log in to make trades with their parents, learn from video lessons, record and send video proof of their activities, and be rewarded by parents with points they could exchange for dripdrop merch.

Design Shifts: Based on user feedback from the working prototype, we made a number of shifts in the product design. We shifted from desktop to a mobile first approach. I researched games and platforms tweens frequently loved, such as Fortnite, Discord, Roblox, Snapchat and more. From here, we adjusted the look and feel of the app to a darker, more edgy aesthetic (the dark mode aesthetic would be better for their eyes).

Impact: The dripdrop app has recently launched and is bringing on new families every week. Seeing families put the app into action has been wonderfully satisfying as a product designer.

It was particularly satisfying to receive the 'proof' videos from the tweens. Daria, seen in the video to the right, shared one with the team that spoke of how she was able to adjust her behaviour to stop procrastinating and control her anxiety!