In tackling how best to design our app, we decided to look at how others are addressing the same problems. Most of the competitors we found in the sustainability industry aren’t information aggregators like we hope to be, so we had to get creative and think about adjacent industries that are trying to solve similar problems.
After a little brainstorming, we determined the fitness industry was a perfect match. Apps in this space help users to make complex decisions with nuanced metrics, track their long-term progress, and develop new behavior. Here’s a few analogs we considered and what we like about each.
Noom. Features we love:
- The education focus. This app provides users with daily lessons that teaches them about the long term impacts of health focused habits
- Customizable user input. Users can select which metrics they’d like to track to customize the experience to something as simple or as complicated as they’d like. This enables long-term user engagement.
- Easy metrics. The app uses a red, yellow, green categorization system for foods so that people get a quick and easy sense of the value of the habits without much research. It then also has a more detailed stats when logging food for people who want it.
LifeSum. Features we love:
- Customizable. The app provides an entrance quiz to help users identify the health plan and goals that already integrate with their lifestyle. This makes it easier for users to stay engaged in the long-term.
- Simplified choice score. Like Noom, it provides a simplified score for foods or healthy choices, however it chose to use an A through E letter rating.
- Simplified habit tracking metrics. Each week it aggregates all of your habits and inputs and gives you a single number progress score. This makes progress that’s multifaceted, nuanced, and intangible, more simple.
Fitbit. Features we love:
- Tangible short-term goals. Allow users to easily visualize and track daily progress with little user input. Lowering the user input burden and making them interact with it daily makes it more likely users will continue to use the interface.
- Competition. It makes fitness social by making it easy for users to compete with friends on customizable challenges.