Drupal Summit Atlanta LifeAlly Case Study

Editor's Notes

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2. Hi, I’m Adam Rosenkoetter, the Chief Technology Officer of LifeAlly and the Technical Director and Partner at SolDesign. \nAbout me;\nSolDesign has partnered with LifeAlly on all fronts to create the first comprehensive health, wellness and lifestyle product built on Drupal \nI’m going to show a quick video overview to give you an idea of what LifeAlly is. \n
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4. LifeAlly is the first unified health, lifestyle and rewards platform built on Drupal. With LifeAlly you can be rewarded just for living a better life and the more you use it, the more it learns what motivates, interests and inspires you.\nAligned around our core feature-set of learning, tracking, rewarding, inspiring, and connecting\n
5. Focused on 4 key areas:\n- Data aggregation: give members all of their data in one place - news, videos, article, blog posts, 3rd part app data, social data into one place and enable easy and relevant access to it. \n- Social gamification: we needed to engage our members and keep them engaged. so we have integrated social gamification into our platform, by leveraging existing Drupal modules like Organic Groups to create the community aspects and integrating 3rd party sharing and gaming functionality. Now our members can compete with each other, earn rewards and discounts just for living a healthier lifestyle.\n- Personalization: When we first started talking about the LifeAlly product, one of the things that I did not want it to be was just a repository of information that people had to search and search and browse through in order to find something relevant to them. So, we knew that to be part of a person’s daily workflow it needed to be able to deliver the most relevant information to the user  at right place at the right time - thus the push to personalization.\n- App integration: We also knew that there are lots of great health and lifestyle apps already on the market and we’re not going to convince people to give those up. Needed to integrate\n
6. As we were looking at platforms for the LifeAlly product, we started with a fairly extensive list of content management and portal systems that may fit the bill, as well as considering building it custom from scratch. I  ruled out pretty quickly the option for building it custom from scratch. \nI also quickly eliminated some of the big, expensive enterprise players in the space, as dealing with a closed ecosystem and high licensing costs is not ideal for a start-up. I wanted a sustainable, and maintainable platform where it is possible to bring in new developers familiar with the platform and have them quickly understand how the system works and be able to extend or alter it. The other aspect that I was looking for was a solid community of developers and an ecosystem that was going to be around for the long-haul and grow as our needs grow.\n
7. - Flexibility (from UI and data perspectives): we needed to be able to use a highly-customized theme and not be limited from a UI perspective (so no issue there with Drupal); we also needed to be able to join together data from disparate sources, but present that data in a unified fashion (Drupal content types looked like the ideal way to be able to do this to me)\n- Rapid development: another need here was speed. instead of building all of the basic content management, security, theming and templating from scratch, we’re able to stand on the shoulders of existing Drupal developers - leverage those capabilities and then build our own custom features and modules. \n- Existing modules/functionality: leveraging existing modules (both contrib modules and core), we’re able to more quickly develop all of the base features of the product and have a maintainable and upgradeable path forward.\n- Responsive theming (mobile, tablet, etc.): we didn’t want to get into developing separate sites for mobile/tablet platforms and need to be able to develpo a UI that could adapt to the various screen size. We ended up settling on the Omega theme in Drupal as our base theme to allow for responsive sizing of the site.\n
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9. As I mentioned, we realized early on that we could not create just another content website with good information. We needed it to be smart and have it learn from what the members are doing. \n
10. Ask profile questions\n
11. combine with user interests\n
12. combine all of the info that the member has given us with actions and behaviors that they have taken\nRate content (thumb up/down); make favorites; comment; write reviews\n
13. We can feed back to the member recommendations based on their profile, likes/dislikes, and general activity\n
14. A Key feature of LifeAlly is the ability to aggregate content from a number of sources, putting it one usable interface and then personalize it to the member. All content comes into the site as content nodes of varying types\n
15. We knew that we needed to build in the social element to the product and we started off by evaluating capabilities pre-existing with core and contrib Drupal modules. We ended up settling on Gigya as the provider of the technology and smarts to power the social registration/login, sharing as well as the social gaming piece. \n- Looked at building it ourselves\n\n
16. - Allows linking of accounts to all major social networks\n\n
17. - Social Sharing encouraged with every part of the site\n\n
18. - Lets members build up points in weekly and monthly contests and challenges, as well as use the points to buy down rewards\n\n
19. - As members build up points they can earn badges for various challenges and level up as they use the site\n\n
20. Based on all of the experience of health professionals that are part of LifeAlly we knew that we had to have Rewards integrated to push real behavior change for members. \nBuilt our own rewards management system in Drupal to allow us to create rewards, set the amount available, the start and end times and the details of the prize\n
21. - compete in monthly challenges\n- weekly contests (sweeps)\n- challenges (sponsor or LifeAlly)\n- giveaways\n
22. On the community side, we all know that people love to share experiences (as proven by Facebook). And by combining the functionality to share experiences and activities on major social networks and allowing for community group creation within LifeAlly we allow for maximum viral spreading. \n
23. Any member can create group, invite others and start sharing of information, blog posts, events, photos, videos\nAre going to extend this capability to organization and brands too\n
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