Incentivizing healthy habits

I led the design of a gamified experience to incentivize usage and drive retention on the Beachbody / BODi platform.

Results: 10m badges earned • 18% engagement lift

The context

Beachbody (which rebranded to BODi recently) was looking for ways to improve retention, engagement and also advocacy and social sharing.

We’d seen Apple Fitness, Duolingo, and others have success with rewards, streaks and badges. Also, focus groups showed incentives could work for some of our users.

So we decided to develop our own gamified experience that rewarded users with badges for doing a particular number of specific actions, like workouts, and for completing fitness programs.

Our scope

  1. Established a gamification strategy and badge structure. We looked at our user data to see what behaviors we could track and incentivize.

  2. Created a scalable badge format. The badge and the shareable asset had to work with existing assets and work on all platforms and devices.

  3. Designed user flows of earning, viewing and sharing across all our platforms. We wanted the badges to be easy to find, but not a distraction.

  4. Created final visual designs for all screens across 9 platforms.

Created a visual system for badges

After many rounds of iteration, we found a format for the design of our badges, and a method for combining program logos with trainer images that scaled for all of our programs. We designed 300 unique badges with corresponding sharable background images.

Mapped out various flows across platforms

We designed the user flows for viewing, earning and sharing badges on mobile apps, web, TV and the bike tablet. We explored streaks, the introduction message at launch, and how to differentiate earned and unearned badges.

Unity across platforms

We wanted to make the experience feel unified across platforms, while making adjustments based on practicality and the unique capabilities of each platform. For instance, on web, we keep the badge screen narrow (shown above) so we could reuse assets across all screen widths.

The community loved it!

The reaction exceeded our expectations. Users took photos of their device screens, and even shared from their Apple Watch, from various countries.

To date, over 10 million badges have been earned.

In addition, we saw that users that engaged with badges were 18% more active post-launch, and we saw gains in retention with this group as well.

I’d love to hear from you

Email me at andrewturrell@gmail.com to chat about a role or project. I’m open to full-time or freelance.