What brands can learn from how Headspace builds

healthy routines
Jo Bowman
Source: Event Reports, Nudgestock, June 2021
Downloaded from WARC

The likelihood of affecting long-term behaviour change hinges largely on giving people the feeling very
early on that they’re already making progress, according to Headspace.

A research project in 2020 examined Headspace users’ first 30 days in the app.
This helped the company understand why people joined in the first place, what they did within the
app and why, and what led them to stop using it or leave the app entirely.

Why it matters
Analysis of user behaviour on the Headspace app showed the value of early wins. Clinical psychologist Dr
Claire Purvis believes these methods can be applied to other products and services to improve customer
retention.

Takeaways
To improve a person’s health, a product or service has to be both effective and sufficiently appealing to get
someone to use it for long enough to generate the intended positive effects.
Health often involves making changes to behaviour for the long-term, in order to have the greatest impact.
But Headspace found that a significant number of new joiners to its app dropped out within the first month.
Analysis of first-week activity in the app, and of the response to minor changes that helped people feel they
were already making headway, was found to accurately predict longer-term use and promote loyalty.

The Headspace app is designed to help people build healthy routines that make them feel better, and happier,
for the rest of their lives. But the long-term benefits of the app, which promotes meditation and mindfulness, can
only be felt if users stick with the programme.

Dr Claire Purvis, clinical psychologist and the Senior Director of Behavioural Science at Headspace, told
Nudgestock 2021 that often people who would benefit from using the app stopped using it before they could feel
its effects.

Routines need to be engaging

“We want to help people build healthy routines that last a lifetime,” she said. “But they can’t drive value from the
product if they don’t use it.

“And this is why engagement is the holy grail buzzword in digital health. We know that half of the total decline in
daily active usage happens in the first week of annual subscriptions, and half of the decline in weekly active
usage happens in the first month of an annual subscription.”

Arresting this early drop-off in usage would not only help users by encouraging them to use Headspace
techniques for long enough to benefit them, Dr Purvis explained, but would also provide lessons in customer
retention that could be applied to other brands and categories.

A research project in 2020 was designed to examine Headspace users’ first 30 days in the app, and help the
company understand why people joined in the first place, what they did within the app and why, and what led
them to stop using it or leave the app entirely.

The aim was to discover what helped or hindered regular mindfulness practice in those early days and weeks,
so that the app could be adapted to boost usage.

Research included a 30-day diary study involving new joiners to Headspace, and qualitative interviews with a
smaller group of participants to delve more deeply into people’s experiences and hear their feedback.

Headspace also looked at the behavioural patterns of more than 300,000 new Headspace members in their first
week of app use and then used that first week of data to predict and understand retention at day 30.

Don’t make it too much work

One key finding, Dr Purvis said, was that members were being asked to make too many decisions in the early
days about how they wanted to use the Headspace app – an extra source of stress at just the wrong time.

Not only were users already feeling tense, which was why they’d come to the app, but given that this was 2020,
they were also dealing with life in a pandemic in addition to their personal concerns.

“People are coming to Headspace in states of acute stress and anxiety, and we really need to be aware and
responsive to a member's affective state,” she said.

“Upon arrival, we need to create experiences that ease the burden of finding a mindfulness practice or
mindfulness content that will provide relief in the moment.”

The company determined that in the first week of joining, users were being asked to do too much exploring of
the app’s options and make too many decisions, when in fact they should have been directed to techniques that
felt accessible to them and created a sense of accomplishment very quickly.
Those techniques, they concluded, should focus primarily on stress reduction; this was to give members
confidence that mindfulness would help them and encourage them to stick with the app, come back more often,
and develop a regular routine involving Headspace.

“They’ve heard that mindfulness is good for them, but they’re not totally certain what that’s all about or how it will
be helpful to them,” Dr Purvis said.

Eye-opening findings
One change that made a particularly big difference to users’ engagement in the app was the introduction of
mindfulness activities that could be done with the eyes open, rather than closed as is more usual for meditation
and mindfulness.

“The critical thing we want someone to experience is that ‘some element of this practice feels accessible to me,
and I can feel how it helps relieve my stress in the moment,” Dr Purvis explained. It’s about building new users’
confidence through one small experience early on.

“I think in health behaviour change, particularly in something like mindfulness meditation, where the rubber really
meets the road is thinking about what is an appropriate near-term reward that really will sustain the long-term
behaviour that we’re looking for,” she added.

“What we don’t want to do is try to get at that by giving some sort of short-term benefit that has nothing to do
with mindfulness – to give them a fun little game with a dopamine hit. We want to think about what’s the true
benefit of this practice, but in the simplest, most accessible, safest way.”

Refinements to the app experience in users’ early days are ongoing, but Dr Purvis said the results of initial
improvements were compelling.

There had been a 9% increase in members completing mindfulness content in their first 24 hours, and a more
than a 6% increase in the likelihood of them coming back within the first five days.

Dr Purvis believes the findings have potential for application to other types of businesses or pursuits that require
people to be engaged for the long term in order to see the benefits – perhaps those related to physical health or
financial wellbeing.

“There’s no silver bullet to solve engagement,” she acknowledged. “There are many factors that shape our
ability to start a behaviour like meditation and to sustain that behaviour over time.”

Her takeaway is the need “to be focused and to be deliberate in which of those conditions we tackle how we
think about creating e experiences that are responsive to the whole contextual experience”.

About the author

Jo Bowman
Freelance Journalist
jo@rjbmedia.net
Jo Bowman writes on marketing and research for specialist magazines in Europe and Asia, as well as on
broader business issues and trends. She has worked in Australia, Hong Kong and Italy, and is now based in the
UK.

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