ExSmokers iCoach application

Client: BrandNewDay

Our role: Development & Technology

Ex Smokers are Unstoppable

The European commission has the ambition to get more and more European citizens to quite smoking.  To aid in this effort they created the campaign "Ex Smokers are Unstoppable" that targets young Europeans between 25 and 34 years old, amounting to a target audience of about 28 million people.  Part of the campaign is the iCoach tool: an online platform for healthcoaching designed by BrandNewDay - part of the consortium executing the ExSmokers campaign - and built by Foreach.

Features and functionality

The iCoach offers the following functionality to support the end-users:

1. Registration and choice of language.  All languages of the 27 European member states are supported.
2. Structured and scientifical process to help you stop smoking in 5 stages.
3. At the start a profile is generated by filling in a questionairre that determines the stage you are in and assigns you a motivation- and behaviour-index.
4. Receiving tips and pointers per email.  The content of these mails depends on the profile generated.
5. Delivering information and characteristics of the different stages of stopping smoking.
6. Delivering different advice for every stage, in the form of plain text and statics, small games and tests, movies...
7. Helping the user become aware of the (dis-)advantages by working around a motivation balance
8. A diary to keep track of your smoking behaviour and feelings
9. Reports that give you a view on the evolution of your smoking behaviour, feelings and results
10. Contact with and support from other users by means of an online forum
11. After a certain amount of time a new questionairre is launched to determine your progress through the different stages and to keep you motivated
12. Standard reports about users, usage, health assessments and numerous other statistical information to support the scientific part of the process

Special points of attention

The iCoach application is available in almost all official languages of the different European states, at time of writing 23 different languages are: Bulgarian, Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, English, Maltese, Danish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Slovak, Finnish and Swedish.  The application was designed to support all these different languages and charactersets, and using a custom made management tools external parties could upload and manage the different languages.

Because the target audience is quite large (28 million people), we also paid special attention to the scalability and performance of the application under heavy load; ensuring a stable environment in all circumstances.

About the campaign

The ExSmokers marketing campaign had its Europe-wide launch in June 2011, which restulted in more than 10.000 users within the first week.  The campaign is expected to run for at least a year on all different forms of media: online, offline (print) and broadcast (tv).  The executionof the campaign was granted to the consortium in April 2011, with a target launch in June this resulted in the iCoach being built and deployed within 2 months time!

Project Size: large

Release Year: 2011

Category: Web Application & Web Site

Technologies: .NET AJAX ASP.NET HTML/CSS MS SQL Server Reporting Services