How to make a better smoking cessation app
They're doing it all wrong
Smoking cessation apps have a problem starting at the vibe level1. The problem is they act like a doctor trying to make you quit. This is ridiculous. It’s just an app and can’t ‘make’ you do anything. What they should do instead is be a supportive friend giving you minor nudges. Possibly represented by a teddy bear or cute animal which is heavily emotionally invested in your weight loss journey.
What smoking cessation apps do get right is having the user check in whenever they smoke, but they give the wrong message when the user checks in. Instead of trying to grant the user permission to have a cigarette or not it should tell you whether it thinks you should be able to go longer, using an algorithm based on how long you’ve gone between them in the past. This should not be an either/or but a gradient between you’ve gone longer than expected to you definitely should be able to go longer. The user then has the option to indicate on second thought they can go longer or that they really are going to have a cigarette. When they say they’ll go longer they bear should give them words of encouragement ‘good job’ ‘you can do it!’ When they do have a cigarette the bear should say something appropriate to how long they went. Short intervals should get messages like ‘I only want to know because I care about your health’, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone’, ‘We all have our setbacks, you can do better next time’ and longer ones getting messages like ‘You went longer than I thought you would. I’m pround of you’.
Yes this is a very codependent bear. It should have the personality of a very sensitive person who cares a lot about you and would cry if you had a cigarette and didn’t tell it. If you go a while without using the app it should send a notification saying it’s worried about you and wants to check in with how you’re doing.
The algorithm for indicating whether the user should be able to hold off longer should be based off how long on average the user has gone recently with an eye towards making it longer. It should adjust the rate at which it’s trying to nudge the user based on how successful the user has been recently at putting off a cigarette after first checking in. If they’ve been successful more often it can extend out, less often and it should back off. At no point should the app ever send a notification to a user that it’s time for a cigarette, even after they checked in and said they can hold off for longer.
At no point should the app ever ask the user if they’ve been smoking on the sly without telling it. That’s a recipe for getting people to stop using it entirely out of shame. Instead the app should tell the users it would be sad if they ever did and let the user feel guilt on their own without ever having to fess up.
I am not and have never been a smoker but I’ve been around people trying to quit and the apps truly sucked.
I smoke for more than 15 years. Tried a lot of methods. Nothing worked.
One day, a guy told me about a book. I don´t remember the name, he does not remember it niether. We were drunk. The book was some kind of biologic essay, something related to Humberto Maturana's line of work. We read some pages together that night. It mentioned how frogs would jump from one leaf to another and how you as an external observer could analyze their behaviour. Some frogs would jump longer, other would fall into the water because of miscalculations.... My mind created the following logic.
1. I always smoke to party.
2. one of my best friends does not smoke at all
3. other of my best friends does smoke, a lot.
4. the 3 of us always party together.
Somehow, I thought about the three of us as if we were frogs, some frogs with cigaretes and others without cigaretes..
Don´t ask me how or why.... but after seeing those frogs in my mind I never smoked again.
This was 8 years ago. Maybe someone can mention the book, I have tried to find it. Maybe someone can this make sense and help others...
Some clues would be:
-Humberto Maturana
-Francisco Varela