Content Systems Research: Behavior-Change Missions

For a pre-launch health and wellness app, I led research on missions: short, 1–5 day activities that help people build healthier habits. Our team's behavioral scientist provided proven behavior-change frameworks to start from, and I drew on them throughout. Over about a year, research took missions from early concepts to a tested framework and a library of nearly 200 built missions. Details are confidential.

Problem:

The app's core experience depended on missions people would actually choose and finish. The team had broad starting categories but little evidence for how people sort, choose or commit to health activities, and no consistent way to create hundreds of missions grounded in behavioral science.

Methods:

• Open card sort (20 participants, 30 missions) & closed card sort with ranking (20)

• Coded 103 written health goals from screener responses to shape onboarding focus areas

• Rapid iterative prototype test of onboarding & mission selection (5 moderated sessions)

• Mission experience prototype test (5 moderated sessions)

• 5-day dscout diary study (4 participants)

• Dyad interviews on collaborative missions (4 pairs)

• Two-session cross-functional ideation workshop

Deliverables:

• Mission card content & commitment guidelines

• A mission framework with 21 reusable templates

• 500+ mission ideas, expanded in AI-assisted batches with descriptions, template matches & behavioral science (COM-B) support, all human-reviewed

Outcomes:

• Shaped mission structure, card content & onboarding before dev handoff

• Gave the team a repeatable way to create missions grounded in behavioral science

• Nearly 200 missions designed & developed from the framework