Adapting an existing feature to introduce five-week health programs without building an entirely new experience.
Actify already offered habits and challenges, but programs were intended to serve a different purpose.
Developed with subject-matter experts, the seven programs covered mental health and women's health topics. Each followed a fixed five-week structure, with activities assigned to specific days and a different theme each week.
The original plan was to give programs a more prominent place in Actify, similar to habits. But fitting them into the existing habit structure would have required changing how the programs worked, including their fixed five-week progression.
I raised concerns about compromising that structure, particularly because the programs addressed sensitive health topics. The team reconsidered the approach and decided against integrating programs into the habit experience.
Instead, we adapted the existing challenge framework. It was still a compromise, but it allowed us to preserve the planned five-week structure without building an entirely new experience.
Reusing challenges meant much of the functionality was already defined. My design work focused on making that framework communicate something different: a structured five-week program rather than a single sequence of activities.
I designed the program cards and their category on the Explore page, as well as a redesigned program detail page.
The program detail page grouped the minis by week, with a label above each week and the day numbering restarting at Day 1, so it no longer read as one long list.
Each week had its own theme, but this was introduced in the program's description rather than in the structure of the page, another compromise of building within the challenge framework.
The screens show the page structure, not final content.
Once a program started, the detail page showed the current day and which minis had been completed. On Explore, an active label distinguished the program the user was following.
Although the programs retained their five-week structure, they also inherited the behaviour of challenges.
Users couldn't return to previous days or complete missed minis later. Days without activities weren't shown in the overview. Changing these behaviours would have required work beyond the agreed scope.
All seven programs were released using the adapted challenge framework. No usability testing was conducted, so I can't say how well the experience met users' needs.
Reusing an existing feature made it possible to release the programs within the available scope. But it also meant accepting limitations that didn't quite fit the experience we originally had in mind.
It's made me think more about how we build on existing products. Reusing what's already there can be practical, but it can also carry limitations into new features. In the future, I'd like to challenge that more, and question whether building on an existing solution is always the right approach.
The photos in these screens have been replaced with royalty-free images, as the app itself uses licensed stock photography.
