Docnotes: Can an insurance company motivate people to exercise?

Short answer? Not very well.

My health insurance company has a program called "blue points" which is supposed to motivate me and my co-workers to exercise. It's a great idea - very poorly applied. Yet another example of the "what " and the "how" being too far apart from each other.

Senior Executive: "Hey - let's motivate people to exercise more - by giving them free stuff if they exercise - let's develop a program that lets them log they activity. When they log activities - we give them points .. and at the end of the year - they can cash in the points for free stuff."

Development project manager: "OK .. we'll make a website that they can use to log in and log their points"

But they missed the part where they think carefully about the user experience. Primary goal: encourage exercise. So we want to enable the application to capture the fact that exercise happened in a manner that is very easy for the end-user. Core principle: meet the user where they live - don't make the user jump through too many hoops to achieve the goal.

I exercise often. As often as I should? No - but at least three days a week - and usually more. In the past year - I ran two half-marathons, one full marathon, and several shorter races. Training for all of this required that I run as much as 40 miles/week. So I should have plenty of "blue points" - right? well .. no - because I would rather spend my valuable time exercising rather than logging my exercise.

Let's see what it takes to log exercise with Blue Points.

9:26 AM - find the Blue Points link:

9:27 .. ahh here it is ..

Next screen ...

New window ... logged in .. pick an activity ..

9:28 ... log my activity ..

9:29 ... type type .. click ..

Check the log to make sure it was saved.

9:30.

Total time = 4 minutes. Not much, you say? What if I was exercising instead of sitting on my butt during these 4 minutes!

so .. five days a week (optimal case .. bear with me) .. exercise for 4 minutes .. = 20 minutes of exercise.. for 50 weeks .. = ~ 15,000 calories I'd spend over a year .. if I didn't have to navigate this maze of a website every time.

Is there an alternative?

Of course. I can think of a handful … But I won't lead the witness. Click here and let me know what you think is a better way. I'll add some of the best of our ideas to mine in a follow-up post. We'll then see if we can get their attention and get this implemented. J ..