Challenges, getting utility workers moving

Problem

The cornerstone of Vimocity is the Daily 5: a short full-body routine targeting the areas that get hurt when you use your body for a living. Done daily, it measurably reduces musculoskeletal injuries — sprains and strains, the things that take a utility worker off the job.

Daily is the hard part. A routine that works only if you do it every day is a routine that fails on the days nobody feels like it. We needed something that made a Daily 5 worth doing on a Tuesday in February, without turning a health benefit into surveillance or a leaderboard nobody asked to be on.

What I did

• Tied challenges to the thing that already worked. Completing a Daily 5 earns credit toward whatever challenge you are in — the challenge does not add a task, it gives the existing one a reason.
• Designed three types, so stakeholders had options to choose which is best for their team: personal targets (you against your own count, earning raffle entries), team targets (the same, pooled across a team), and leaderboards (teams ranked against each other).
• For the Leaderboard challenge, worked out the team-size problem. A large team wins any contest scored on totals, which makes joining a small crew pointless. Teams are scored on the share of what they could have completed — members times days — so a five-person crew and a fifty-person one are measured on the same scale.
• Set join windows, so a challenge is a fixed period with a start and an end rather than an open-ended obligation. They run from a week to over a month.
• Designed for web and mobile as two specs rather than one stretched across both. On our desktop app there is no challenge screen at all — but complete four moves in a day and that counts toward your Daily 5, and toward any challenge you have joined.
• Tested with customers and non-customers, checking that the mechanics motivated rather than pressured.

Outcome

• Daily 5 completions rose 65% among people in a challenge.
• 25% more people registered for Vimocity in order to take part in one.
• Movement became a shared activity rather than an individual task, without making participation conditional on being ranked.
• The feature works across every platform from one set of rules.

Who did what: I led design and UI. The frontend and backend logic were written by our engineers, and the challenge mechanics were shaped collectively with our entire team.

Design note: the hardest decision was making competition optional. Leaderboards motivate some people and alienate others, especially in a health and safety context tied to work — and the people most likely to be alienated are the ones the Daily 5 helps most. Personal targets let someone take part, earn the same raffle entries, and never appear in a ranking.

Organizations run these themselves rather than asking us to set one up. That took its own tool — see the challenge admin tool.