Check

Stay on Track

Inspiration

Do you ever feel overwhelmed with how many tasks you have to do and feel the need to tick them off to help ease the overwhelming pressure?

A To-do list comes to mind right? Have you ever consistently used one every day for more than a few days?

I have lots to do in my life and little time for flexibility so I need to plan my days to hit the goals I want to achieve every day. For example:

Wake up at 6am
Have breakfast
Go to the gym
Cycle to work
...

However, I lack the tooling or motivation to keep on top of this and see if I am consistently hitting my goals. As a result I miss some of the goals and feel like I'm not making any progress in my life or falling backwards.

I need something simple to track my goals, see my progress, and motivate me to keep hitting them. Every. Single. Day.

What it does

Check is a mobile application that notifies the user twice a day (lunchtime and evening) to check off the goals they have achieved in that portion of the day. This is done in a similar way to how BeReal or Duolingo reminds you the check in.

The user selects from their predefined goals, orders them in the order they did them and submits them. They are then notified of their new streak and are returned to the home screen to see any updates on their progress.

The goals are sent in order as events to amplitude, where they are ingested, processed into segmentation charts and funnels and the data is returned back to the application to show the user their progress and infer how they can better achieve their goals when compared to others in their cohort.

This helps remove the burden of remembering, makes it easy to track progress and as a result will reduce stress/anxiety in not achieving their goals.

An example of how this can be applied to improving people's well-beings further can be shown by a study by the British Journal of Sports Medicine which found that "morning exercise improves attention, visual learning, and decision-making." and that "days with morning exercise were associated with better cognition throughout the day". By encouraging users to hit their goals of gymming in the morning and eating healthily, users lives should see improvement with the encouraged motivation and consistency.

How we built it

We identified our individual strengths and split the work accordingly.

Ryan - front-end fanatic Matthew - data devil David - back-end boss

Ryan setup the front-end using next.js and tailwindcss for fast development. Implementing 3 pages to submit events, show the success of the submission, and show the extracted data on the home page. Ryan was also responsible for the overall design of the application.

Matthew used python to model people tracking their goals, and what goals they achieved over time (with organic variation) as they track them. Using this he generated a large event-based dataset, modelling the users uploading goals they did/didn't achieve twice a day, over 60 days.

David setup the back-end in next.js api routes to utilise the amplitude sdk's to send events into amplitude and generated the charts to export back to the app.

We used GitHub for version control. Vercel for branch based deployments and hosting. We also started on the presentation and document early on Sunday to allow for refinement, which were achieved with collaborative tools in Google's suite of office software.

Time Breakdown

Day 1

Create web app
Create data generation scripts
Fire events from app to amplitude
Start presentation

Day 2

Start submission write up
Fire events from data generation scripts to amplitude
Generate charts for app in amplitude and embed in app
Finalise

Example Stories that the app can generate

"For people that successfully woke up with their alarms and then went to the gym, those that achieved the gym goal at least once using Check, have an 85% chance to go to the gym again that week.

For people that successfully woke up with their alarm but failed to go the gym, they only had a 23.8% chance of successfully going to the gym later in the week."

The same concept can be applied to those that had breakfast and then cycled to work.

"Those that utilised the app, saw a steady increase in consistency achieving their goals over time. Some goals saw over a 200% increase in hitting tracked goals. Motivating people to stay on track once they start tracking it"

In General, before people track their goals with Check, they achieve goals intermittently. After they start using Check, they improve the frequency and consistency of completing their goals.

Challenges we ran into

Visualising and extracting the data we wanted from the event data was a challenge that we had to pause and think about. The initial scope of generalised data was too large for the time frame and we opted to show specific funnel examples in the demo.

The data generation script took up more time than expected due to the nature of the model. We opted to move to a simpler modelling technique in order to populate Amplitude with the dataset in time.