2. ExMokers

A project developed from scratch for a health insurance company. A gamified app to help people to quit smoking.

This project started as a collaboration with a big insurance company based in Catalonia. The ultimate goal was to help heavy smokers to quit. After some research based on surveys (and my own experience as smoker), our team defined our Persona and we started some early mock-ups.

The idea was to turn this project into a game, because we didn't want to create another clone app that tracked how many cigarettes the user smoked during an established period of time. Following this idea, we decided to use the approach of there being different planets across the galaxy getting polluted, and the users, with their healthy habits, can create a positive impact on them.

The project was designed entirely for mobile apps, a decision that was made after checking the data we previously collected. Most of the people we interviewed admitted that they were social smokers, meaning that usually they smoked outside surrounded by other colleagues: therefore, in those instances thy had direct access to their phones, and not to their computers.

By iterating with some early adopters we discovered that the gaming approach made people compete with each other, and that observation convinced us to implement a ranking system within the app. During any gamification process one of the key components that drives the design is the change in conduct that takes place through the game: as designers we must boost those aspects that we consider beneficial and try to reduce the ones that could be considered undesirable. The ranking page successfully boosted users’ engagement during the first weeks of the process of quitting smoking, which are always the hardest.

This app is no longer available in the Android Store because it was replaced by another app that was more closely aligned with branding.