Integrating daily puzzles into Actify's existing activities and challenges, with a new mini variant and automatic completion when a puzzle is solved.
Actify helps users work on healthier habits through small daily activities, known as minis, and longer challenges.
As part of a collaboration with a partner, we introduced puzzles as another way for users to engage with the app. The puzzles offered an opportunity to bring relaxation and cognitive activity into Actify's broader health and lifestyle offering.
The puzzle-playing experience itself was provided by the partner. My role was to design how users would encounter and use it within Actify.
Puzzles became part of the existing minis and challenges, not a separate product. This meant considering how users would start a puzzle, return to one they hadn't finished, and recognise completion within Actify.
Actify's regular minis are completed manually. Users do an activity and then mark it as done.
Puzzles are different. The puzzle already knows when someone has solved it.
I proposed that completing a puzzle should automatically complete its corresponding mini in Actify. Asking users to return and check it off themselves would add an unnecessary step after they had already finished the activity.
The approach was discussed with the team, accepted and implemented.
The partner's puzzle environment also displays a completion message with an option to return to Actify. Back on the Today page, Actify uses its existing notification behaviour to acknowledge completion.
These states help the puzzle feel like part of Actify's daily activity system rather than a disconnected destination.
Tapping the mini opens the puzzle in an in-app browser.
Actify provides the navigation back to the Today page, while the partner provides the puzzle interface, including its controls, timer and gameplay.
The integration needed to connect these two environments without requiring users to understand where one system ended and the other began.
Puzzle minis could be used in several parts of Actify: as standalone activities, within challenges, and on selected days of habit programs.
Standalone minis could be added to the Today page through Explore, while challenges offered a structured series of activities over several days.
As more puzzle-related challenges were introduced, finding them became increasingly important. At the time, users often had to search for a specific challenge by name.
The product team proposed a dedicated puzzle page to bring these challenges together. I designed the related changes to Explore, including an updated category navigation, as part of a broader update that also introduced programs.
The updated category navigation, with puzzles as one of the categories. Selecting it brings puzzle-related challenges together on one page.
This gave puzzle-related content a more visible place within Actify's existing structure.
Adding something new to a product doesn't always mean new components or a separate user journey.
Here, the most useful design work was in the connections. An existing interaction behaves differently when the context calls for it, and users move between two experiences without extra steps.
The released integration had its limits too. Daily puzzles were tied to the existing mini structure, and users couldn't revisit completed puzzles in Actify.
Within that scope, I focused on making the journey from starting a puzzle to completing its mini feel like one continuous flow.
The integration design was not formally usability-tested.
The photos in these screens have been replaced with royalty-free images, as the app itself uses licensed stock photography.