Health Goals

The opportunity

At Omada, we empower people to achieve their health goals, one step at a time. When our participants are on-boarding, they are asked to enter what we call a “big picture” goal. These are goals that a participant cares about deeply. It’s often their why for starting the Omada program e.g. “I want to be around to see my kids grow up”.
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Because big picture goals are achieved in the long term, we get participants to set a proximal goal, which are smaller goals that can help them reach their “big picture” goal e.g. “Lose 30 pounds”. Although proximal goals are smaller than big picture goals, they can still take some time to achieve.
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We are introducing the SMART goals feature to help participants gradually work towards achieving their proximal goal in a specific and measurable way. People are more likely to achieve a goal when it is SMART. In addition, SMART goals provide a structure for long lasting behavior change.

From our behavioral scientist, we also understood that lasting behavior change is achieved when goals are personable, emotionally driven and give a sense of autonomy and competence. By introducing SMART goals to Omada, we can give our participants a greater sense of autonomy and competence, which would empower them to continue working towards achieving their bigger health goals.

MVP and Functional Requirements

Our main focus for the release of the SMART goals feature, was to create an MVP version(v.0.5) that we could ship quickly and learn from. The aim of SMART Goals v.0.5 was to roll it out to a small percentage of our participants to test whether they were interested in pursuing SMART goals.
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To do so, we worked very closely with our behavior change scientist to define the right steps of the feature to be successful from a behavior change stand point.

Then, together with the PM and engineers, we brainstormed the scope and effort involved to build the initial SMART goals feature (v.0.5) and future versions. Because we wanted to quickly ship our MVP in order to collect data and iterate, we needed to understand what was feasible to do now for the purpose of testing and what was not achievable until later versions.

MVP version

With this first release, our MVP allowed participants to learn about SMART goals, setup a personalized goal (through surveyGizmo - external survey tool), reflect on their progress, and set up next steps once completed.

Follow up research

After the release of our v.0.5, we conducted interviews with participants and looked at user data to answer important questions that would drive our future solution (v.1.0). The quantitative data from v.0.5 showed that participants were interested in pursuing SMART goals.

We identified a number of areas that can be improved upon in v.1.0 from interviews conducted with participants. The following themes emerged from the qualitative data we collected.

Based on these findings we decided that v.1.0 should incorporate the following elements:
1. Better integration and visibility within the current program;
2. A guided experience of setting up a goal;
3. Richer and more targeted coach support for those participants that need help to achieve their goal;
4. Goal-tracking which allows participants to reflect on their journey and make notes of the circumstances surrounding goal completion.

v.1.0 wireframes explorations

What we delivered

SMART goals is now a feature that allows participants to setup, plan, track, reflect, and be coached for health goals of their choice. This feature evolved from an MVP (v.0.5) to a viable feature (v1.0) by conducting user research and thoughtfully considering how to meet user needs. The Smart Goals feature is now available for iOS and android.