Competition

There are a few other apps I have took a look at because either I’m aware that they’ll be direct competition, or information from people have indicated they’ve solved some of their habit problems through certain apps.

Habitica - Gamify your life

Habitica aims to help you track the progress of your habits, and motivate you to improve your routine by using gamification as its main weapon. It tries its best to stray from being a “task management program” by disguising itself as a role-playing game.

Positives:

• A completely new experience to tracking habits.
• Detailed gamified experience.
• Naturally attracts gamer audience looking for solution to habit tracking.
• Always free.
• Has a significant amount of downloads in both Apple and Play stores.

Negatives:

• Looming subscription model for additional in-app rewards.
• Gamification can be too much.
• More time required to maintain using it.
• Some reviews mentioning it’s buggy.

Verdict:

I’ve used this app myself in the past and I found that I got bored of the game, before I got bored of the habit tracking. The game is really the bulk of the experience with this app. While I do want to incorporate gamification into my app, I don’t want it to go anywhere near this extent. I believe habit tracking is something people don’t want to spend any more than a few seconds a day doing, otherwise you also run into an issue of having to motivate a user to form a habit of opening your habit tracker.

The subscription model is not a nice fit in my opinion, as it may make users feel like they’re not getting as much as they could be for their hard work. Not great when you’re looking to motivate.

It has gained a lot of success in being a wildly different solution to the problem, as this likely makes it attractive to media. (After I typed this, I checked the website again for a “featured on” section, and unsurprisingly, there is one).

Habit Bull

Habit bull is a fully featured habit tracker which aims to be as flexible as possible when it comes to breaking bad habits and building good habits.

Positives

• Loads of features.
• Straight to the point.
• Well rated, lots of downloads.
• Aimed at your average person.

Negatives

• Very bland UI.
• Maybe too many features (Built in motivational images?)

Verdict:

I’m not going to lie, this application is going to be the toughest competition I’ll go against. It has a lot going for it and the amount of features is intimidating. The only real weakness I see to the application is that it doesn’t provide much of an experience which makes me think could make the app less attractive to be launched daily.

In a way this app lets you set up your habit tracking to be very specific. There’s a lot of flexibility. This description gives a good example:

Very flexible goals like: number of times per day/week/month, only on certain days of the week etc. For example: 30 push ups every Mon-Fri, go to the gym 2 times per week, or even every 2 days

Maybe this is a weakness in that it’s too much? Without making it seem like I think like there’s no use to this kind of flexability, personally I just want to ask myself “have I succeeded x habit today? (yes / no)” and be done.

Other applications

I’ve done some lighter research in applications like “My Fitness Pal” and “Fitbit”, and while I will compete with them it’s hard to take a lot away from these applications. A lot of them allow you to track your stats far better, but in a way I believe this is beyond the scope of the problem I’m trying to solve. I think there’s enough room for my app idea to survive alongside these applications.

One interesting thing to consider is, however, some of these applications allow you to integrate with them. Perhaps it’s something I’d want to look at in the longer term.

A digital scrapbook by William Park. It contains details about my final project "Habeats" for my final project at Interaction Design Belfast.

This material is my submission for IXD501.