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Goalmates

Go together, Grow together

Project summary
Goalmates is a socially-driven habit tracker where users form accountability groups to help them stay engaged and motivated towards achieving their goals. Goalmates diversifies itself from other habit tracking products by leveraging group accountability and social connections towards successfully setting, tracking, and reaching goals.
Project Outcomes
Interactive high-fidelity prototype driven by research findings. Goalmates was the sole project selected to represent the work of our cohort in program informational sessions.
Client
IBM Research
Methods Used
User Interviews
Feature Ideation
Personas
User Journeys
Usability Testing
Wireframing
Prototyping
Timeline
February 2023 to March 2023. Adjustments made Summer 2023
Team
2 UX Desigers
My Role
User Research
UI/UX Design
Success Metrics
in progress :) 
Problem
Why habit trackers fail
With the increased awareness on the cognition behind effective goal setting, there has been a rise in habit tracker services. However, despite the emergence of such tracking applications, we observed that individuals still struggle to reach their goals effectively [1].
  • Additionally, we found that deliberate goal setting can be a double-edged sword, as not reaching goals can lead to more negative mental states [2].
[1] https://medium.com/finding-greatness/why-habit-trackers-dont-work-for-me-6b2643ad06cb
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3864849/
Solution
Go Together, Grow Together
Goalmates is a socially-driven habit tracker that utilizes community, companionship, and comradery to create an ironclad accountability system.
[3] https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/an-accountability-partner-makes-you-vastly-more-likely-to/310062
GoalMates in action
How to complete a goal
View the full application prototype further below, but here is a small snippet of what to expect from Goalmates. Press the blue circles to continue through the prototype.
Research
The interplay between group dynamics and motivation Levels
We interviewed students and working professionals on their experiences with goal setting, accountability, and social connections. Primarily, we were interested in understanding the following.  
Takeaways
We observed that people were motivated to contribute in groups, provided that they feel a sense of connection to that group. The majority of interviewees were motivated by the success and progress of peers, but also expressed a sense of  guilt when others were making progress are they are unable to, which can be either motivating or despairing
Personas
The hare and tortoise dilemma
From observing the way that interviewees ranked the features, we observed two common types of users: Hares and Tortoises

Hare-type users valued efficiency, and were excited by the prospect of creating a shared space for users with high-levels of motivation to benefit from group accountability and collective wisdom.

Tortoise-type users valued the nurturing nature of community, and saw accountability groups as a support system while growing and networking with similar-minded individuals.
journeys
The adventures of the hare and the tortoise
After we had an understanding of the needs of our two different user groups, we hypothesized their best-case user flows inside of our application. We prioritized delivering a digital experience in which Hare-type users would be enabled to create highly functional and effective spaces while Tortoise-type users felt safe, secure, and welcomed.
Feature Selection
How we created safe, fun, and motivating groups
By combining our research themes, identifying the two motivations of our common user types, and understanding the ideal experience flows of these users, we were able to organically ideate on features that directly addressed user pain-points rather than being biased from our own preferences.
Designing
Basic Design Components
We initially planned to use a purely greyscale color palette for the majority of our interface, and allow for colors inside of user-generated groups to be selected by them to allow for customization and personalization. But due to our limited time constraints, we opted to use a monochromatic orange color palette to reflect optimism, vibrance, and compassion, all of which being emotions we wanted to cultivate through our application.
Wireframes
Lofi-sketches
We made a deliberate partition between the interface inside of user-generated groups and the interface outside of groups. Certain elements, such as the main navigation bar, would be hidden when inside of groups to prevent clutter.
Usability Testing
Making our Accountability Stronger
Finished Product
Goalmates: Go together, grow together
Prototype
Full Product Demo
Future work
Premium Version
Several "Trackers" on the application market provide premium service to paid users. We are interested in exploring what types of premium services we could offer our users to provide them with more value from Goalmates. We need to continue ideating on such features.
Reflection
Deadlines directly impact designs
We were aware that due to the nature of our class deadlines, time was the least available resource at our disposal. However, some of our initial design decisions were not cognizant of that bottleneck, such as creating several different complementary color palettes that users could choose from, which we later pivoted into having just one color palette. This was a lesson on being aware of deadlines when planning out our design goals.
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