When I first started at MeYou Health a little over a year ago, I had no idea how I would build a product that facilitated behavior change. Crazy enough, I am speaking at a few conferences in April on this topic, so I am in the process of putting together the materials. They center around designing for the first step. It is a belief that before we can do anything major, we need to get people up over the first hurdle of doing something, anything, to improve their health.
Figuring this out started in January of 2010 with interviews. We partnered with a market research company and conducted dozens of video and in-home interviews. We asked people about well-being. What do they think it is? What prevents them from improving? How could we help?
A month later, we interviewed a few dozen more individuals as part of a branding project. If there was a company about well-being, how would it inspire you? What would it offer? From this information we build a test product (a minimum viable product) and launched it to 1,500 people. 60% of those used it every day for two months. Each day we asked them how they felt. Did they do something new? How did it make you feel?
We then surveyed those participants and asked them: did we change your life yet? Thankfully, some of them answered yes!
I learned a lot about people in those four months. But the most important thing was somewhat unrelated to what we needed to succeed. Instead, the most important thing I learned is something that could cause us to fail... or worse yet, end up lumped in with many of the online health solutions out there:
It is really easy to reach the people that do not need help.
Let’s say you build a health product, and you put together a search engine marketing strategy that targets all the fitness health keyword volume you can get your hands on. Are you really reaching the people that need your product? No, you are not. Recognize that any health product will always get a segment of the population ready to try the latest and greatest online health solution. These are people who are already at a sufficient state of readiness to search for products and content in this space. These aren’t your real customers and if you attract lots of them you might think you are doing great.
But these are the wrong people! They don’t need our help!
When you attract the wrong people, you start doing the wrong things. You ask your participants to do things they aren't ready to do yet. You ask them to enter information they don't know yet. You trivialize their challenges, misunderstand their barriers and priorities, and alienate them in record time. You end up with a health product full of healthy people.
The individuals I want in our products are all those without the current desire to take action. These are the individuals who are too busy to work on their well-being, too quick to make excuses, or are enabled by culture, location or circumstance to maintain behaviors detrimental to well-being. Just imagine how easy a product needs to be to attract this mindset. That is where we started.
So in the words of Maya Angelou, I am obsessed with how we help others know better, so they can do better. Stay tuned for the principals that help me keep MeYou Health's Daily Challenge on the right path.
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