Creative Agency Reimagined
Project Concept Label
FRAMER, UI/UX Design, Website
Project Type
Getting people to genuinely participate in a workplace wellness challenge is harder than it looks. The default — a leaderboard, a nudge notification, a prize, rarely moves the needle past the first week. So when we set out to design Stepathon, we didn't start with the design. We started with a question: what actually makes someone show up, day after day, and keep going? The answer took three months of research, a dummy challenge, and a willingness to scrap what wasn't working before we committed to anything.
Before a single screen for Stepathon was designed, we ran a controlled experiment. A dummy challenge, internally called the Paz Challenge, was launched specifically to study user behaviour in a low-stakes environment. We tracked daily active user spikes, mapped which incentives drove participation, and documented every gap and friction point in the existing competition flow. It gave us something no brief ever could: real data about what motivates real people to move. That foundation shaped every design decision that followed, from how the challenge was structured to how progress was surfaced to participants.
The first version of Stepathon went live as a direct result of those learnings. We ran user testing to pressure-test the design before launch, iterated on the competition flow, and kept the experience as frictionless as possible for both participants and the companies enabling it. After watching Stepathon land successfully, 25,000+ participants, 14 crore total steps, a 40% lift in daily active users, we went back to users for another round of interviews. That feedback shaped an improved version of the flow that client companies can now enable directly within their own organisations, making future challenges easier to run and harder to ignore.
Stepathon ran from February 25 to March 6 and the numbers were hard to overlook. Over 25,000 participants from 400+ companies took part, collectively logging 14 crore steps over the course of the challenge. Daily active users jumped 40%, averaging 3,500 unique users each day, a figure that reflects not just initial sign-ups, but sustained engagement across the full duration. More than the metrics, what the challenge proved was a process: that designing for engagement starts long before the product goes live, and that the willingness to test, learn, and iterate is what separates a campaign people forget from one they actually show up for.
