Movement challenges: Leaderboards and targets that build a daily habit

Problem

The Daily 5 is a full-body movement routine that takes five minutes or less. Done consistently, it has been shown to help prevent injuries on the job, along with the stiffness and soreness that physical work often causes.

Daily 5 completions are Vimocity’s key engagement metric, and one of our main goals is helping workers make the routine part of their day, on the job and off. So we built challenges: a layer of competition that puts teams of coworkers head-to-head. This was 0→1. There was no challenges feature to improve on, so the scoring, the join windows and the challenge types were all decisions rather than inheritances.

Design challenge: letting teams of very different sizes compete on a level playing field. We normalized leaderboard scores to completion rate rather than totals, so a small crew can compete against a large one. A team earns up to 100 points a day: the share of its members who completed the Daily 5.

What I did

• Started with research. We talked with customers to find the main UX challenge: how to get more people completing the Daily 5. I then tested each mechanic with customers and non-customers.
• Made it easy to compete. Completing the Daily 5 is all it takes to take part in a challenge.
• Time-boxed every challenge. Join windows run from a week to over a month, so a challenge reads as an event with an end.
• Designed two challenge types: a leaderboard for teams and a target challenge for individuals. A third type, team targets, was retired after low participation.

Leaderboard

Teams of coworkers compete for the top of the leaderboard, and the team on top when it ends wins.

Individual target

No leaderboard and no ranking. Each person works toward their own target.

Outcome

• +65%

  Daily 5 completions among challenge participants

• +25%

  registrations from people joining a challenge

• 10% vs 4%

  of challenge viewers signed in within a week, compared with everyone else

• +61%

  sign-ins in months with a major challenge

Leaderboards drew the highest engagement of any challenge type. Between challenges, Daily 5 engagement dropped: competition built the routine, but didn’t hold it.

Who did what: I owned design from research through UI. Engineering built it, and we worked out the mechanics as a team.

What I’d change: two things. First, the 100-point cap. Committed crews all max out and tie, and the tiebreaker (largest team, then a random draw) hands the win back to the bigger team, the bias normalizing was meant to remove. The next iteration makes full completion the entry price, not the max score. Second, bonus points for watching safety videos beyond the Daily 5, so challenges also grow viewership of our safety content.