Building the GOQii India Health Quiz Challenge
Helping Indians bust health related myths
The Idea
Using the popular Live Quiz format to bust health-related myths and make Indians more aware of healthy habits. We wanted to create a 100-day challenge that would be shaped around users playing Live Health Quizzes on the GOQii app. They would earn points by answering questions, and then redeem those points for rewards such as iPhones and GOQii trackers and a grand prize of 5 Lakh rupees.
Objectives
- Spread awareness about good health practices
- Make health information more interesting
- Reward Indians for being healthy
Why Live Quizzes?
The Live Quiz format provided two major benefits,
- Users could learn about healthy living in an engaging and interactive manner instead of simply reading blog articles or watching videos.
- Users couldn’t cheat since all the users are provided with a new set of questions at the same time and had only 15 seconds to answer. This way users cannot search for the answer before starting the quiz.
Why a 100 day challenge?
We chose to make it a 100 day challenge because we knew that user acquisition would build over time and we wanted to make sure that even if users joined the challenge late, would have enough time remaining to win any prize they wanted. For example, even if a user joined on the 30th day of the challenge, they would still stand a chance to win an iPhone.
There would be 16 Quizzes per day, starting from 7am and ending at 10pm. This way, users could play quizzes at their convenience.
Scoring Mechanism
Users earn 50 points per quiz. There would be 5 questions per quiz. If you answer one incorrectly, you are eliminated and will not earn any more points. Hence this format made it tougher to reach the later questions.
We chose to do non-linear scoring to consider this difficulty factor.
Linear v/s Non-linear Scoring
How do we educate users about the other benefits of GOQii?
Users needed one key to participate in each quiz. In order to earn keys users need to perform various activities on the platform, such as complete 6,000 steps, or fill out a Health Risk Assessment. This allows the user to understand all the offerings of the GOQii ecosystem and how they can use these to improve their health.
Building in Virality
As with other Live Quizzes, we have the concept of lives. Lives save a user from elimination when the user answers incorrectly. Only one life can be used in each quiz.
Users can earn more lives by inviting their friends to join GOQii. To incentivise further, if their friends also play quizzes, they would get even more lives.
Running Simulations
As with any game, balancing is important. If the game is too easy, users will lose interest. Too difficult, and users will feel demotivated and stop playing.
Deciding the number of points required to claim each reward had to be simulated across various scenarios. What if someone played all the quizzes each day and scored full points? What if they averaged at 30 points per quiz?
We ran simulations with a test audience and tweaked this to perfection.
Technical Challenges
Users of GOQii get access to about 25 Live Health Classes each day. These range from Yoga, to Diet advice, to Mental Wellness topics. Users can real-time interact with coaches and get their health related queries answered.
The Live Quizzes were built to happen during the live health classes. Following we the framework we implemented to facilitate this.
Live Video Streaming and Live Quiz Services
Live Streaming
For Live Streaming we used the Wowza Streaming Engine. This allowed us a convenient way to manage and transcode video streams.
The job of the Streaming Engine is to ingest an RTMP stream from the streamer’s (coach’s) mobile device and transcode it into an adaptive HLS stream. Adaptive means that depending on the User’s network speed, a different quality can be served. This makes it possible to serve a near real-time video stream even on low networks.
Live Quiz
For the Live Quiz implementation we used a real-time communication framework. This provided us a way to handle real-time broadcasts of questions and answers at scale (serving millions concurrently).
When a user joins a quiz in the GOQii app, they are “subscribed” onto a channel. They will thereafter receive all broadcasts made on that channel.
GOQii servers sent data (questions) to the channel which in turn broadcasts this out to all the connected devices.
This way we were able to keep all the devices in sync during the live quiz and provide an excellent real time gaming experience.
Sourcing the questions
We at GOQii offer lifestyle coaching services for which we have a large team of dieticians and nutritionists working across the country.
We sourced health related questions from these coaches. The questions had to have the following constraints,
- Questions have to be short enough to be read and answered in 15 seconds.
- Questions could not be too technical else users will lose interest.
- Questions should be difficult enough for users to use up their lives.
Anomaly/Fraud detection
As with any game, cheats are waiting just around the corner.
We built anomaly and fraud detection into our system. We did this by employing two techniques,
- Sending each questions separately so that users cannot get early access to the question set even if they tried to read the request.
- Posting the answer to the device only at the end of the question timer
- Detect anomalies such as, if any user was rewarded more than 50 points in a single quiz, etc.
We also had end to end encryption on all the requests to protect the data even if it is intercepted.
Making Akshay Kumar the face of the game
Akshay Kumar had joined hands with GOQii to promote this challenge. We had to make sure that we used his presence optimally across the app and leveraged his personality in our messaging.
Myths finally Busted!
Millions of players have played health quizzes on GOQii and improved their health knowledge.
43% Indians think that Diet Soft-drinks are good for their health.
92% Indians did not know that after you quit smoking, positive changes can be seen in as little as one day. Most users thought it takes a week to a month.
84% Indians did not know that stress and anxiety are some of the leading risk factors for mouth ulcers.
83% Indians did not know that the blood type O- is a universal donor.
77% Indians thought that Watermelons are rich in fiber. When in fact Watermelon is a poor source of fiber, providing only 0.4 grams per 2/3 cup (100 grams).
The Future
When our aim at GOQii is to improve and influence the health of 130 crore Indians, it becomes absolutely necessary to push the barriers of tech innovation and product thinking. You can expect a lot more exciting updates from our team this year.
