warrimoo
Duolingo’s streak has a body count. People do French at 11:58pm on their honeymoon out of fear of a cartoon owl. As behaviour design goes it’s brutally effective, and both my apps borrow from it, carefully, because medication adherence is one of the few places where the technique is aimed at something that matters.
Here’s the tension. Consistency genuinely helps: doses given on time, blood pressure logged most mornings, the boring rhythm that makes the health data mean something. Anything that encourages the rhythm is doing clinical good. But the dark side of streak design is shame, and shame around medication is poison. Miss your dad’s evening tablets once and feel like a failure, and the app has made a carer’s hard week worse. That’s not a growth hack, that’s harm.
So the streaks in TreatMyPet2 and the achievements in Treat the Babs follow house rules that Duolingo’s owl would consider disgracefully soft.
The streak celebrates, it never threatens. A good run gets a quiet nod when it’s done, not a countdown while it’s alive. There are no notifications about a streak being “in danger”, because the only notifications a meds app should send are about the meds.
Missing a dose breaks nothing except the number. In Treat the Babs, a missed morning becomes a gentle “catch up on today”, the record stays truthful, and tomorrow is a fresh page. The diary matters more than the run. A carer looking after someone with dementia does not need a purple app grading their week.
As-needed medication never counts against anything. Pain relief given “as required” is a judgement call, and a streak that pressures you to give or withhold a tablet to protect a number would be actively dangerous. Those meds live outside the whole system, on purpose.
And nothing is ever red. The palette for adherence runs from “quietly pleased” to “silent”. The app has opinions about calendar maths, not about you.
Underneath all the restraint, the mechanism still works. A tick feels mildly good. A tidy week feels better. That tiny pull is real and it compounds, and for the medication that keeps a dog’s itching down or a mum’s blood pressure steady, compounding is the whole game.
Borrow the pull. Bin the owl.