Personalized smoking-cessation support, built on behavioral science.
MyQuit let smokers log cravings, rate their intensity, and browse tips and articles. The functionality was there — but nothing about it was personal. I'd just come out of BJ Fogg's Behavior Design bootcamp, and this was the first real chance to put it to work: could we turn a logging tool into something that actually changed behavior?
"The functionality was there — but there was no real 'make me quit smoking' support."
BJ Fogg's model says behavior only happens when three things line up at once: enough motivation, enough ability, and a well-timed trigger. I used it as the working framework for every decision on this project — mapping each existing (and proposed) app feature to the piece of the model it was actually serving.
Target behaviors were kept deliberately simple: track your data, and do something to avoid smoking. Every motivator, capability, and cue in the app existed to move a user closer to one of those two actions — increasing the likelihood, moment to moment, that the target behavior would actually happen.
One of the bigger shifts we made: giving the app a pre-quit phase. Before a user's chosen quit date, the app is already learning — building a picture of their current habit so that once the quit process actually begins, the support it offers is preemptive and targeted, not generic.
Persona, triggers, motivation ranking, NRT product, and goal quit date — captured upfront.
The app tracks cigarettes and cravings by date, time, and trigger — learning the times of day and days of the week a user is most vulnerable.
With vulnerable moments already mapped, the Behavior Support engine tailors both message content and timing from day one.
In order to personalize the messages, we needed a better understanding of the type of smoker we were dealing with. We identified four core smoker personas — and asked a few additional questions to build out each one's profile. The key new ingredient: what's your trigger? Something we could not only track, but message to directly.
We know the smoker type, we know what time of day they're most vulnerable, we know what triggers them to crave and smoke. Using that data, we defined five families of message — each mapped to a specific behavior-support principle.
BSP: Capability / Motivation — tailored to which of the four personas the user matches.
BSP: Capability — keyed to the trigger the user selected during setup.
BSP: Motivation — built from the reason the user ranked most important.
BSP: Capability — tied to the nicotine replacement product the user is using.
BSP: Well-timed cues — preemptive alerts sent before a recurring trigger hits.
"Night out? A lozenge could help you deal with that post-drink craving. Cheers!"
Push notifications are a privilege, not a given — so before we wrote a single one, we grounded the strategy in research: industry benchmarks on notification fatigue, and a GSK-run focus group that told us what users actually wanted to hear from the app.
of users said they'd immediately delete the app or disable notifications if unhappy with the messages.
more app launches for apps that send in-app messages, versus apps that don't.
click rate with profile-based personalization — nearly double the 7.4% "send to everyone" average.
In early 2016, GSK ran a focus group to test the antennae device and app feature ideas. Personal Progress, Motivate Me, and Milestone Rewards ranked highest; distraction feed, hints & tips, and win badges ranked low enough that we recommended against using them as external communications.
The research pointed to four things external messages should be used to communicate: behavior support, milestones, motivation, and progress — everything else stayed in-app.
Good triggers prompt action; vague or irrelevant messages just annoy. A trigger should cue one specific, simple behavior.
Users expect only important, urgent messages on their lock screen — language has to earn the interruption.
Send a message at the wrong moment and people won't care what it says — they'll ignore it.
Behavior- and profile-based personalization meaningfully outperform generic, send-to-everyone messaging.
A/B test phrasing, action verbs, and character length to find what actually moves this audience.
A little unpredictability makes users more likely to respond — don't send the same notification twice.
| Where GSK wanted external notifications | What we recommended instead |
|---|---|
| Progress badges | In-app notification on launch, not external |
| Craving / benchmark badges | In-app, delivered the moment the action is achieved |
| Milestones + motivational messaging | Kept external — well-timed, personalized, and combined where possible |
| New app features | Covered in the onboarding tour, then in-app to educate |
The core action of tracking took six steps to input data. If we wanted the user to build a habit of tracking, it had to be easy and quick to complete. With ergonomics in mind, I rebuilt the flow to two quick thumb gestures — one to open the tracking menu, another to add detail.
One tap opens the tracking menu; a slider captures intensity; one more tap submits and returns to the dashboard. What used to take six steps now takes two thumb gestures — the single most-repeated action in the app had to be the easiest.
Days smoke-free, cigarettes not smoked, cravings survived, dollars saved — the dashboard and log view gave users a running scoreboard for their own quit, and a place to look back at exactly what happened, and when.
One of my favorite accomplishments on this project was building a visual representation of how the app would actually deliver support — mapping personalized messages, in-app actions, and external notifications against a real four-week quit journey, for each persona.
Personalization, then the antennae device connection, then settings, then pre-quit tracking — sequenced so the client could see exactly what shipped when.
It's important to stay grounded in the core functionality of the app, and make sure everything you add still supports the original mission. Whatever your app's core function is — make sure it's easy to use, and bad ass.
All in all, this was probably one of my most challenging projects — not because of the setup of the companies involved, or the complexity of the messaging, or the amount of documentation that needed to be created. It was challenging because it was important to someone. Someone out there wants to quit smoking. Perhaps they'll find this app. We really only get one chance to make the right impression. But even greater — we have a chance to help someone make a change in their life that will help them live longer. That's a challenge I enjoy.