Lumosity Meta Experience
Re-imagining the Lumosity experience
THE COMPANY
ROLE
Lumos Labs believes in helping people keep their brains challenged, by transforming science into engaging experiences. Their product, Lumosity, enables individuals to train core cognitive abilities through daily “workouts” consisting of 3-5 fun games built on the foundation of cognitive tasks.
Web/Mobile Interaction Design, User Research, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Design Strategy
CONTEXT & CHALLENGE
Cognitive games are at the core of Lumosity, but it’s the wrapper around those games (the meta experience) that help evolve the product into an ongoing health app. I was asked to be part of an innovations team (two designers, one PM) working to discover how to improve the Lumosity meta experience. At a high level, we were tasked in learning how we could improve user engagement and retention within the Lumosity experience.
Note: The following page is a case study of my team’s thinking around how to create an experience framework that leads to ongoing behavior. It will not show the process of one design concept, but many concepts, tests, and learnings that lead to our framework.
Process
PHASE 1: PROBLEM SPACE DEFINITION
Prior to re-imagining how the Lumosity experience could change, we needed to fully understand the problem space. To do so, we evaluated the current experience for non subscribing users, looked into how they interacted with the product, and did benchmark research to understand what makes a sticky experience.
EXPERIENCE EVALUATION
In evaluating how the meta experience was performing in terms of engagement and retention (Figure 1), we discovered some high level pain points:
We force users through a flow - Once a user starts a workout, they can only follow their daily games in the given order.
We tell users to leave the product - After completing a workout, we tell users to “come back tomorrow.”
Users have minimal features engage with once their workout is complete - Once a workout is complete, all content in the product is locked except for stats.
Figure 1: Daily user flow in Lumosity in 2016
RESEARCH
To understand how users engaged with daily workout of games and why they drop off, I conducted 14 user interviews to develop insights to share with the team. Additionally, our team did benchmark research in the Cognitive Training, Fitness, Education, and Games spaces to understand the mechanics that lead to ongoing engagement.
HYPOTHESIS FORMATION
With the combination of user insights and a gap analysis between Lumosity and other products, we came up with 4 hypotheses of mechanics that could improve the Lumosity experience:
Autonomy will help users feel in control of their training, which will intrinsically motivate them to engage with the product.
Rewarding users will make the training experience more enjoyable, leading to higher engagement to continue those feelings.
A sense of Progress will remind users of how they’re doing in Lumosity, and will motivate them to engage with the product to reach their goals.
As users put time and effort into Lumosity, they’ll have a sense investment in the product. Providing ways to see this investment will lead to longer retention.
PHASE 2: DESIGN & TEST HYPOTHESES
After determining our 4 key hypotheses, we conducted multiple brainstorm sessions to determine how we might test each one. I worked closely with my team to create various concepts and user flows which we user tested weekly. The following will outline some of the concepts we developed and tested for each hypothesis, and what we had learned.
Figure 2: Autonomy in order of workout games
Figure 3: Autonomy in daily workout games
AUTONOMY
What we tested:
We tested various ways to give users control of their daily training. Some examples include picking the order of the games in their workout (Figure 2), and the ability to replace games within their workout (Figure 3).
Learning
At a high level, we found that adding more autonomy on a daily basis lead to less user engagement and lower retention. The main takeaway was that forcing users to make choices on what to work on every single day might be burdensome over time.
Figure 4: Rewarding users for performance in each game by offering 1-3 stars
REWARDS
What we tested:
To test creating a more rewarding Lumosity experience, we gave users 1-3 stars for every game they played, based on their game performance. Users would get a delightful animation and a banner highlighting their achievement for the day after playing a game. (Figure 4)
Learning:
While rewards were found to be very exciting during user testing, when out in the wild, the mechanic had a limited impact on engagement and retention.
Figure 5: Offering a sense of investment by letting users collect games
INVESTMENT
What we tested:
To provide a sense of investment, we rewarded coins for playing games and completing daily workouts. Coins were spent to unlock games to keep forever within a game collection feature. (Figure 5)
Investment was seen in the amount of coins users collected, and the number of games they had unlocked.
Learning:
We found that allowing users to unlock games through effort helps motivate training. By providing a way for users to see their investment into the product, we were able to increase both engagement and retention.
Figure 6: Offering progress at the front of the experience
PROGRESS
What we tested:
Existing progress metrics failed because they were based only on game performance, and over time, performance will plateau.
To remedy this, we designed an experience to let users make progress in each brain area, based on their training performances and consistency. This way users would always make progress if they continued playing.
As users played games, they would be rewarded 1-3 stars based on their performance, which would feed into and increase that game’s brain area level. (Figure 6)
Learning:
Engagement with games increased, but next day retention only slightly improved.
We found that providing a sense of progress focused on training performance and consistency made users want to play more. Users also enjoyed seeing their brain’s strengths and weaknesses.
From user feedback, we also learned that offering progress was useful, but it needed a higher level goal to lead into, otherwise motivation will wane.
PHASE 3: CREATE AN ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK
From testing our hypotheses, we found that Reward, Progress, and Investment are the key factors in keeping users engaged and retained. We decided to reframe investment as Identity – what users were really creating when investing into the product was a deeper sense of identity within Lumosity. We then framed the ideal experience as the following:
The core experience should provide rewards that feed into a user’s progress within product, creating an identity which in turn, continues to impact and shape that same experience.
Figure 7: Ideal experience framework
PHASE 4: DESIGN HOLISTIC EXPERIENCES
Defining an experience framework was the most important piece of this project, but we needed to validate that a holistic experience using this framework would work.
We designed multiple concepts (examples highlighted in Figure 9 & 10) based on the following flow: As users train on more Lumosity games, their progress unlocks content that is added to their daily training experience. Our designs aimed to create a looped flow between the daily experience and the user’s identity.
Framework Learning
Through user testing and data from developed tests, we learned that with this framework significantly increased both engagement and retention, especially in comparison to our previous tests. Users enjoyed seeing how they progressed in the product, and how they earned the experiences they were playing through.
Figure 8: Lumosity flow with framework applied
Figure 9: Concept showing identity by brain area level
Figure 10: Concept showing identity by overall Lumosity level
REFLECTION & RESULTS
Given that this team was focused on engagement and retention, we did not focus on a third metric that is important for the business: conversion. We were successful in increasing metrics the company hadn’t been able to in years, however our concepts failed in making more money than the existing experience. We would have loved to iterate on our concepts with the new goal of conversion, however our team was unfortunately disbanded in 2017.
Overall, being on the MetaXP team was a challenging but rewarding experience, as it taught me how to approach and think about behavioral design. It was the first time I was focused on not creating a single solution, but many concepts to understand how to create a framework that leads to behavior change around brain training and habit forming. I think the biggest takeaway from this project is that, even though you are directed towards specific business goals and going broad to innovate, you still need to consider the context of the product you’re designing and how it fits into the business.