As GoalTribe, Suruchi and I built the first Facebook fitness behavior change app. It was called “The 30 Day Fitness Challenge” and leveraged game mechanics. We launch this during the last days of GoalTribe, during a challenging time when Facebook admitted to having the worst API stability ever. It was showing great promising, but in the end it went under and GoalTribe did too.
We still think it’s a very promising design, and would love to relaunch it sometime. We did all the behavioral design , interactive design, visual design and coding ourselves on this one.
If we were to relaunch this today, we would design for a daily workout habit of perhaps five minutes in the beginning and slowly expanding to 30 minutes. Daily habits are much easier to design for and to develop into habits. So the three times a week aspect of this app (especially allowing you to do it on any days of the week) made it more difficult and less effective than it could have been.
