What are Self-Care Areas?
Self-Care Areas is a feature that lets you group goals by topics where you can select a pre-existing area (e.g., Gratitude, Movement, Sleep, etc) or create a custom area. Self-care is very broad and it’s our responsibility to provide an easy way to organize and empower their own self-care across mental health, physical health, and productivity. This was designed to improve upon our old Journeys feature that had various challenges.
For a quick look into Self-Care Areas, here are some example screens:
Choose a pre-defined area or create your own
Birds eye view of your self-care
Movement self-care screen
Earn Stars and Rainbow Stones with milestones
Self-Care Areas is officially replacing Journeys with the hope to support the following:
- Clearer picture of your self-care: Self-Care Areas helps people understand where they’re making good progress and what areas may need some more attention. We aim to balance providing gentle nudges with positive reinforcement.
- Easily understandable by anyone: While we noticed community users could enjoy Journeys, we found most struggled with understanding how to use Journeys even with explanations. Making Journeys accessible on home screen ironically hurt goal completion on average. From trialing Self-Care Areas though, we believe it’s significantly more intuitive for more people to be able to build stronger habits.
- Milestone progress: Showing up is the hardest part and we want to celebrate effort we want to emphasize progress is more important than perfection. Folks will earn Stars and Rainbow Stones as they make progress throughout the week. There’s a big spectrum to how to celebrate progress where people are motivated by different things.
- Improved performance: There were various performance challenges with Journeys, especially for folks with many Journeys or goals. We believe that the new design behind Self-Care Areas helped us solve some of the major performance issues.
- Stronger habit formation: We’ve always wanted Journeys to be a part of the core product experience, but any time we tried to increase visibility, it’d unfortunately and ironically hurt habit formation for the average user. We’ve iterated on Self-Care Areas to the point where we found it to actually encourage more people to want to build stronger habits.
Like with every feature in Finch, we plan to continuously iterate on this to help make self-care easier for more people. Making informed decisions is important to us so we value the continuous feedback. If you have thoughts, feel free to reach out to [email protected].
Why self-care areas?
What problems is Finch Team trying to solve?
Our missions is to normalize daily self-care, and it’s critical for us to make it easy to help people understand what self-care means to them, identify the areas most important to them, and provide guidance on how to navigate their self-care.
While Journeys was first created to help people organize their self-care and did find some success especially with users in the community, the biggest challenges our team has been tackling have been:
- Difficulty in understanding Journeys: This was especially true for folks who were less tech-savvy and people who were less familiar with how to think about their own wellbeing. We’ve dug deeper with in-person interviews and it was clear that it’s a struggle even with explanations.