Applied Health Gamification Platform
Leveraging a robust UI Prototype to build stakeholder consensus
- Discovery
- Design & Usability
- User Interface
- Agile Development
Applied Health Analytics is a Nashville-based company providing employers a common data platform, analytics and an unrivaled level of community-based interventions to reduce risk, and better serve a valued commercial population. AHA offers users a set of tools to track personal health statistics and goals and interact with a coach for guidance and accountability.
AHA enlisted By The Way Labs to design and build a gamification platform to integrate with their toolset, expanding the concept of accountability to organic teams. Using concepts we had explored with street teams for entertainment artists like Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith and Eric Church, we developed a team-based approach, which rewards participation within campaigns. Campaigns are time-gated and provide a framework to wrap up activities in a theme - which facilitates marketing and engagement.
Weekly challenges serve to educate about participation and health benefits as well as keep up motivation. Leaderboards and intra-team tracking and communication tools provide accountability, a critical component of behavioral change. The Check-in+Act+Motivate game flow encourages players to hold their teammates accountable and be accountable to their teammates.
The web application is developed in Symfony with an AngularJS front end.
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By The Way Labs was a fantastic product development partner. Their deliberate process was critical in determining the scope of our project and establishing consensus between the numerous stakeholders.
By The Way Labs provided excellent communication through every step of the engagement, ultimately delivering a product that fulfilled all business goals on time and on budget.
As a byproduct of working with By The Way Labs, we were able to improve our approach to product development best practices within our company, which we recognized would position us for quicker discovery and product development in the future.
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Developing a Gamification Strategy
The term Gamification refers to the idea of using familiar, gaming-inspired formats and techniques to encourage people to achieve their goals. It helps put otherwise abstract ideas like “personal growth” into a context that people can more readily identify with – such as scoring points, or winning in a contest.
Design & Usability
For rapid development, we relied on Sketch and Invision to develop fully functional mocks. Stakeholders were able to provide feedback to the demo at each stage of design, allowing for quick, iterative product development.
Symfony Module, API Integration
An ‘addon’ module was developed to integrate with the client’s existing Symfony application. It defined all of the pages and database interactions required to fulfill the gamification design strategy. Included in this effort was a placeholder API integration, which was required since the client-developed API was in active development.
Sales Collateral
To support the product, we authored several pitch decks for Applied Health’s Business Development team. The decks were used both internally as well as for selling the Gamification Platform to existing and prospective partners.
