I Wish This Existed on Google Calendar (part 2)

Routine (Part 2)

Imagine it’s January 1st, 2022.

Despite all the adversities thrown at you by 2021, you have accomplished everything you wanted to. Your personal growth has skyrocketed, you are in your peak physical condition and your social life has never been better. But more importantly, you have a plan and the commitment to make 2022 even greater. 

Does this sound too good to be true? 

Well, it's not easy. But it is achievable if you have the right system in place.

Welcome back to part 2 of the Routine article! 

For those of you who are new here, I am on a personal mission to leverage the power of technology and psychology to help people “achieve” their goals. If you haven’t read part 1 of this duology, Uncovering the Success Formula, please check out the link below! Part 1 covers the background and reasoning behind the solution and design that will be discussed in this article. 

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Figure 1: The Social Dilemma (Netflix)

If you have watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix (fig 1.), you probably already know some of the psychological manipulations and strategies tech giants and social media platforms have used (and are using) to get us hooked to their product. However, I believe that these psychological tricks, if deployed responsibly, can also do a lot of good and help with activities such as losing weight, reading more books, and ultimately achieving our goals in general. In this article, I will share with you a preliminary idea of a digital tool I’ve designed using positive psychologies and behavioral science to help improve lives. 

I am sure that Tristan Harris, Google’s ex-design ethicist and product philosopher and the main expert in The Social Dilemma, would approve of this idea. Cheers!

But before we jump right into it, here’s a quick recap of part 1. 

Quick Recap

In part 1, Uncovering the Success Formula, I explored the “secret formula” world-class performers used in approaching and accomplishing their goals as well as the Cognitive Biases preventing many people from doing so. What I have found was that for you to achieve your goals you need the following things:

1. Have a clear goal and direction, a “north star”
2. Identify the “sub-goals” you need to accomplish in order to actualize your bigger goals
3. Break these sub-goals into small tasks that you can do on a daily or weekly basis

Put it simply, to achieve your goals, you need to have a routine! 

But as many of you may already know, setting up and following a routine is easier said than done. Therefore, I have hypothesized and tested a three steps solution that aimed to help you set up and follow a personalized routine (while also enjoying the process, of course!)  

Hypothesis:

If I take the users through a 3-step process that starts by identifying users’ goal, allowing them to borrow tasks from their role models and fitting those tasks into the users’ current calendar in a manner that prioritizes one task at a time, the users will be able to effectively adopt and benefit from their new routine. 

To validate my hypothesis, I used a technique called the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) prototyping in which I “faked” the functionalities and manually provided the user-experiences without actually building a digital solution. If you are curious to know how this was done exactly, please revisit part 1. 

After testing the 3 steps solution, although it was far from perfect, it did show potential! The people that I tested this approach with had incrementally adopted their new personalized routine and benefited from it daily.

Therefore, in this article, I will take it one step further and propose a solution that I wished existed on Google Calendar (or Outlook Calendar,) by putting all the information and learnings into one pot and “stir up” a scalable solution that will democratize the secret of routine formation to help millions achieve their goals.  

Figure 2: Stir it up (James Harden)

Meet ROUTINE

Based on the Secret formula, I have designed a platform called “Routine” that uses a goal-driven approach in combination with personalized timeboxing to help users set up their ideal routines and achieve their goals. Routine will also enhance the path people often take to building their system by allowing users to search and “borrow” individual tasks (or an entire routine) from their role models and friends (you’ll see how this works below.) 

But what really excites me about building such a platform is its long-term potential! This platform will eventually carry the greatest archive of routines, especially those of highly successful people, allowing us to better understand and polish the “Secret Formula.” - what it takes to be successful!

Figure 3: Meet Routine

Before jumping straight into the UX/UI, I have mapped the solution I’ve envisioned onto the Octalysis framework, a tool that helps explain the drivers behind our behaviors and actions, as shown in fig 4. The solution leverages a good balance of all eight “core drives” of human motivation with a special emphasis on a sense of accomplishment and ownership because it revolves around enabling users to build their routine (by giving the users a sense of autonomy and control over their goals) and guiding them to complete their tasks as they work toward their goals (by enhancing their sense of accomplishment). 

Figure 4: Octalysis Framework Solution Mapping

I have also learned that what defines us as humans, is a combination of the need to be creative and social. Therefore, Routine will tap into this innate need and allow users not only to build and share their routines but also to borrow and to see other users’ routines including their role models’. These features have been designed to motivate and engage the users throughout their journey and add a social currency, known as “borrowers,” to the platform. - similar to “followers” on Instagram.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the Routine experience.

Onboarding Experience

To make this an immersive experience, go ahead and play the 3 minutes video on top. 

What you have just watched is what we call the “onboarding experience,” which starts the moment you download Routine and open the application for the first time. 

It begins with a standard signup page to minimize confusion and reduce cognitive load, plus, if you sign up with Facebook, Routine will allow you to see your friends on the platform, making the entire experience a bit more social. 

After registration, the application will ask you to put on a pair of earphones and take you through a unique interactive, 3D-sound experience by narrating and “hand-holding” you through the entire process of setting up your first routine. 

Food for thought (1):

The onboarding process is like the tutorial mode in games! It teaches you the basic controls and rules of the game while giving you a small initial victory to build early momentum. Therefore, make it easy for the users to “win” quickly early on because winning helps build confidence and thus progress.

Figure 5: Uncovering your “WHY” and what are you willing to sacrifice

The process starts with uncovering your “WHY” by asking you to either type or select a reason why you want to build a routine (fig. 5). What is your goal? This is an essential process because not only will it help you form your routine by giving you a sense of purpose and direction, but also will allow the platform to utilize this particular information to remind you to keep going whenever you are unable to keep up with your routine. Just like a life coach, but with data!

Next, Routine will prime you for the challenges ahead by explaining that “every great success comes with great sacrifice” and ask you to type or select what you are willing to sacrifice in order to actualize your goals. This is an important step to prime you mentally for hardship and commitment (there're no easy paths to success) and thus increasing your likelihood of success (by reducing your likelihood of quitting.) To further induce such commitment and “seal the deal,” Routine will offer a commitment contract that you can make with the application by scanning your fingerprint, a feature inspired by a very interesting application called Fabulous.

Food for thought (2):

How successful your platform becomes depends on how successful your users, especially the early adopters, become. Therefore, if you take the time to help them succeed, they will become your advocates, your “true fans”.

The application will then start showing off its features, taking you step by step through the entire process of building a routine from scratch. First, it will take you to your profile page where you’ll see a radar dashboard with seven vectors, each representing different aspects or areas of life. This dashboard will allow you to see which areas of life you are currently invested in the most so that you are aware of your current priorities. Taking you down the screen, Routine will then ask for information about what time you want to wake up, work and sleep. This information gives the application the necessary information to structure and personalize the ideal routine and notifications for you. Continuing down the page, it will ask you to tap the “Create New Routine” button, which will take you to the “Find Routine” feature. This feature, one of the unique value propositions of the application, will allow you to borrow tasks and routines from other users. Check out our first user's review!

“ I no longer have to google Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s routines, they are all here! Definitely recommend this app to all the productivity nerds out there!”

(5 stars)

-Imaginary User1

Figure 6: Borrowing tasks from role models (please note that none of the tasks shown are real activities from these individuals)

Therefore, tapping on the button will generate a list of influential figures based on the areas of life you have chosen to focus on first (fig6.) This will be a very online-shopping-like experience in which you can go into different profiles and drag and drop different tasks into your tasks list (like a shopping cart.) And once you are done, you can make a few final adjustments to each of the tasks and add them seamlessly into your routine, aka. checkout! 

Food for thought (3):

To provide an intuitive/seamless experience, it is often helpful to leverage and build on existing behaviors that have been established by other platforms or applications your users use on a daily basis. In this case, the online shopping experience has been adopted to help the users navigate Routine. 

Figure 7: Setting up your calendar

Once the tasks are added into the routine, they will be placed into the calendar based on their initial setup (fig.7). However, at the bottom of the calendar, you will find two very important features that will increase your likelihood of success. First is the auto-adjust feature, which allows Routine to prioritize the tasks for you, allowing you to focus on a few items at a time and increasing your likelihood of success. The importance of taking on a few tasks at a time was discussed in the first part of the article. If the users take on too many tasks and fail to accomplish them, they will experience a sense of failure and loss of motivation. A negative feedback loop.

Second, equally as important, is the integration with external calendars feature that gives Routine visibility of your current daily schedule, allowing it to fit the tasks you selected automatically into your life without major disruptions. This will also enable the application to time its notification so that it nudges you at the right moment and time. This is one area many productivity applications have neglected, for example, they may send a notification telling you it’s time for yoga while you are still in a meeting. The trigger for action becomes useless if the user is unable to do the task. As we have learned from the BJ Fogg model (fig.8) that for a behavior to occur, there must be 3 ingredients at the same time:

(1) Motivation, (2) Ability, and (3) Trigger. 

Figure 8: Fogg Behavior Model (Fogg)

After you integrate Routine with your external or work calendar, it will load for a few seconds (fig. 9), giving you the “perception” that it’s working very hard for you while also building anticipation for the final product, this is also known as the Kayak effect. We tend to appreciate things more if they work harder for us. 

Figure 9: Your first win

Once it is done loading, you will have your final routine with task boxes placed strategically into your calendar (timeboxing) ready to be followed and accomplished. If you look closely at the current date in the calendar, you will see that the tasks are already marked as completed in green on 1 July. This is done intentionally to leverage a psychological bias known as the endowed progress effect, which gives users an artificial sense of progress and instant gratification. “The early win.” Once again, harnessing the power of human psychology to help users stay motivated. 

By the end of this entire onboarding process, another cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect, which causes people to place a disproportionately high value on something they have built themselves (because of the sense of ownership and accomplishment that comes with building something yourself,) will kick-in to solidify the users’ commitment. 

Now, enjoy the rest of Routine. 

The Rest of the Experience

Now that you’re all set up, what will the rest of the experience be like?

Figure 10: Profile page

The first page you’ll see after logging into the application by default is your profile page (fig.10) which centralizes everything you need to build and follow your routine. This page is designed to give you instant feedback on your progress while utilizing several cognitive biases and core drives (from the Octalysis framework,) to help you stick to your system. 

The profile page consists of a color-coded circular progress bar that strategically shows you how close you are to completing your tasks for the day. This mechanism harnesses the power of a cognitive bias known as the Zeigarnik Effect, which is our tendency to complete leftover tasks and feel the sense of accomplishment of crossing items off our to-do list, to intrinsically motivate you to complete your tasks.

In combination with this progress bar, you will also see your daily streaks, showing you how many perfect days -- days in which you completed all of your tasks-- you have had in a week. This feature was designed using the Endowed Progress Effect, or our optimism in achieving our goal when we notice some kind of progress and a Core Drive ( from the Octalysis framework, ) known as Loss and Avoidance, which is our fear of losing what we already started and accomplished including our progress, to motivate users to keep going. 

Food for thought (4):

Can we ethically use fear to influence users behavior if it's for their benefit? Is it like when you were forced to eat your vegetables?

This is a debatable ethical issue in design, therefore, let me know what you think in the comment below! 

Other features in the profile page include the following: 

1. The “routine clock” around your profile picture helps you keep track of your tasks.
2. The radar diagram, which helps you see which aspects of life you are currently focused on.
3. Your daily structure, which allows you to adjust your day so that Routine can give you a more customized experience. 
4. Your routine playlist, which allows you to switch between different routines that you have created or borrowed. The Routine Playlist feature, similar to the Spotify playlist, also creates a sense of Ownership (one of the eight core drives of the Octalysis framework,) for the users.
5. The Friends tab, which will show you a list of all your Facebook friends on Routine, allowing you to interact with other users and borrow their tasks and routines.

Figure 11: Reward Mechanism

However, you’re probably also wondering, “how do we keep users engaged long term?”

This is where gamification comes in! Another core feature of the application is its reward mechanism. Because we all enjoy playing games and overcoming challenges every now and then, I decided to provide a game-like experience by giving users special tasks and challenges, especially ones outside their focus areas (based on their radar diagram) to help them expand their interest and form a more well-rounded routine long term. For example, if your routine lacks mindfulness, a challenge could be to meditate for 10 minutes daily on a given week. 

These challenges are automatically inserted into the users’ calendar to help them dedicate the right amount of time for the task (indicated in yellow in fig.11). Once completed, the users will be rewarded with different accesses and knowledge such as various productivity hacks that are aligned with the users’ goal. 

Ultimately, the users will gain a personal knowledge library from their achievements. Therefore, not only will the users feel the gratification from overcoming these challenges (sense of accomplishment,) and a dopamine boost, they will also become more attached to the platform now that they have a personal collection. This feature, therefore, will also help retain users long-term by increasing the switching cost, because the rewards are exclusive to the platform. The two core drives that come into play are Ownership and Loss/Avoidance (as shown on the Octalysis, fig.4).

Figure 12: Notifications and Motivation

The last piece of the puzzle to help the users adopt new behaviors and achieve their goals is to have the right triggers. As you can probably tell by now, the theme here is really to keep the users motivated throughout the process. Therefore, sending the users personalized motivational messages from people they admired or reminding them why they started this journey in the first place (the “WHY”) are effective triggers to jump-start their day (fig.12).

Food for thought (5):

The aim here is to help users get 1% better everyday (which is equivalent to 37 times better in 1 year.) But that 1% is often so subtle that we don't see the immediate progress we crave. Therefore, it's essential for ROUTINE to help celebrate that 1% and keep its users motivated!

I wish this existed on Google Calendar

As demonstrated with Routine, we CAN utilize human psychology to improve our lives instead of to ruin them. Routine has been carefully crafted to leverage gamification and psychological strategies to keep its users engaged and motivated so that they can form practical routines, work toward their goals systematically and live a purposeful, well-rounded life. 

Although this is a mock project, I believe that tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft (the list goes on,) that own a calendar system can easily adapt and integrate Routine into their current (or potentially new) product/services and help to make millions of dreams around the world come true. 

But in the meantime, if you are a bored (but passionate) developer looking to change the world through psychology and technology or simply someone who wants to learn more about Routine or shared a common interest in productivity and the art of applying the lessons of behavioral science on oneself, please feel free to drop me a message! There’s always more to learn!

Thank you for reading till the very end! If you are reading this sentence, you probably like this article, so don’t forget to hit the like button, leave a comment and share!

Because….. “There’s no reason not to follow your heart” - Steve Jobs

References:

Notes: The icons/images were not created by the author. If they have not been cited, they were downloaded from vector stock or freepik. 

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2. Chou, Author Yu-kai. “Octalysis: Complete Gamification Framework - Yu-Kai Chou.” Yu, 9 Oct. 2019, yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/octalysis-complete-gamification-framework/.
3. Cy, Sarah. “Motivation Is Overrated - The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden.” Medium, Medium, 14 Mar. 2019,medium.com/@sarahcy/motivation-is-overrated-the-motivation-myth-by-jeff-haden-98df2623dcdd#:~:text=Jeff Haden's premise in, to succeed in their accomplishments.
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