USANA Reset Nation

Project Description:

One of the most fun projects to work on but yet had quite a few challenges. We ran this weight loss challenge 3 years in a row, with our original release year for 2014. One of our biggest obstacles was to increase participant involvement and keep users engaged as the contest progressed even if they weren’t losing weight as quickly as they might have originally hoped. We approached this last re-design with that in mind and made a sleeker, 100% mobile responsive site to facilitate involvement from any device.

While we built the site on WordPress to handle the front end content management, we added a lot of custom PHP scripting to handle the more advanced admin. Participants could monitor their friend’s progress, as well as message and invite other users to form a team. We also extended user profiles, by allowing AJAX driven image uploads for ‘Before’ and ‘After’ photos along with personal and team profile pictures. Users would weigh in weekly and we would graph their progress as well as their team progress and then post the top teams and individuals stats on the leaderboards. All graphing was done by utilizing the Google Charts API, and we implemented several PHP scripts to weed out false or dishonest entries, and created a manager to allow admins to manage the contest in all aspects.

We even built a wizard to help users wrap up their profiles and details at the end of the contest and get it all submitted to the administrators. Through the entirety of the project we also offered support for participants via them submitting tickets to Zendesk, where I led a small support team to service them.