Plunge: Challenges

Gamifying the Plunge App to further incentivise users to track sessions, by completing challenges with the community and earning badges.

Role:
Lead Designer

Platforms:
iOS, Android

Areas:
Strategy, Design, Illustration

Background

A major roadmap item we identified in 2024 was how we could incentivise users to track more sessions, and in turn encourage more usage of the app. It was also one of the priority items for myself and the engineering team in our efforts to transition the Plunge app into a full-scale wellness offering, rather than a simple IoT product.

Many Health and Fitness apps have started to implement achievement badges and rewards into their offering. It’s a proven-success story, and so the idea of Plunge Challenges was born.

This item was bumped up to highest priority when well known human biologist Gary Brecka wanted to get involved, after he met with key stakeholders and was pitched the idea. He loved the idea so much, he asked for his own challenge in the app for users to complete.

Approach

Initial research and brainstorming sessions between myself, engineering and key stakeholders made it clear that we needed to come up with a visual style for how the challenge badges should look. We wanted to make these special, with each badge carefully crafted for a particular challenge, while also fitting in seamlessly with visual style of our app.

After much trial and error, I arrived on a set style for the badges - inspired by metal pin badges to make them feel like physical items. Careful use of iconography, colour use, and shape helped distinguish each badge ‘type’ into set categories.

These were set up using a careful grid system to ensure consistency, and then set as components within our Figma design system to ensure seamless use within our designs.

Challenges

With challenge types, and badges defined - I turned attention to how the Challenge area of the app should present itself from both a UX and UI perspective. After some user feedback and sign off from key stakeholders, I designed a new landing screen where all Challenges would live - separated into ‘Active, Featured and Join’ areas. From here, the user can tap into a challenge to learn more, as well as join or start a session directly.

A number of new modules and components were created and implemented into the design system, to ensure consistency moving forward.

Over time - Plunge challenges became a powerful marketing tool - with major brands opting to collaborate with Plunge and make their own challenges, such as Liquid Death and ALS.

Impact

Since Challenges was rolled out as a major feature, it’s been a resounding success. Post launch, metrics have shown a significant increase in the number of sessions, with thousands of users having completed challenges so far. It also significantly bumped up the amount of downloads of the app, which has been increasing since rolling out each ‘wellness’ feature.