This project was born from the parallel identified between the sense of gratification we feel when we successfully care for virtual pets and when we accomplish our personal goals. That similar sense of pride in our efforts led me to link these two seemingly independent experiences to one another. In this project, I wanted to see how behaviorally contextual reminders can provide users with the opportunity to get the immediate gratification they need to be positively reinforced for habit-building.

So, how can caring for virtual pets help build habits in users?

In his book, author Nir Eyal describes a habit as a "behavior done with little or no conscious thought." He describes the process of building a habit-driven strategy in products as the Hook Model, "a looping cycle that consists of trigger, an action, a variable reward, and continued investment." Borrowing this model, I outlined the trigger, action, variable reward, and investment of having habit building companions (virtual pets).

With this model and the general concept in mind, I moved onto sketching and building out the experience. Below are documentation of the user journey and user flow.

Mapping out the User Flow

User Journey Close-up

Prototyping

Rapid prototyping in Unity

I prototyped the main experience mapped out above on Unity in AR, including the sign up and onboarding, reminder, two reactions sequences to the reminder, and collection scene. In order to build this experience, I imported UI assets I created on Figma, and the pet models and their respective animation created on Blender.

Highlights

Final Thoughts

Possibilities

What if users were rewarded with external benefits as well?

Taking a look back at the Hook Model, we can expand on the Variable Reward and Investment of this experience when we consider users receiving external rewards to help motivate them in building action-based habits. What if users could earn points to gain access to better health insurance or financial services plans through this experience? Below are quick sketches to depict what could happen if health insurance companies rewarded users with successful health and wellness oriented goals.