Pave — a free app for 16–24 year olds, co-designed with young people and built on behaviour change theory.
Context
A 19-week design & build project for Cancer Institute NSW.
Cancer Institute NSW is the state’s cancer control agency, responsible for prevention programmes including tobacco and vaping cessation.
Australia’s youth vaping rates quadrupled between 2019 and 2023, from 5.3% to 21%.
Challenge
How do you help someone quit when every existing tool was built for somebody else?
Existing quit resources were designed for adult smokers. That left 16–24 year olds without targeted support at a critical point in their development — the group whose rates were rising fastest, and the group with the least relevant help available.
Approach
Discovery & planning
Research to understand the audience and where the opportunities were, then exploring and testing those opportunities before committing to any of them. Co-designed with a panel of young vapers and tested over 22 sessions with a similar audience. That produced a roadmap of the end-to-end experience.
Running alongside it, we worked with Cancer Institute NSW and their subject matter experts to develop a behaviour change model for this specific audience — young people vaping, not adults smoking. That model then determined which features the app needed. The harm-minimisation approach came directly from it: slip-ups don’t reset your progress, because that’s how quitting actually goes.
Design
Detailed design of each opportunity, then stitching them into a single end-to-end experience. From there, translating it into the components and templates developers could build from.
Build & testing
Handover to the development team, working alongside them through build. Quality assurance with the developers, checking the built product against the designs.
Outcome
An app built specifically for young people rather than adapted from adult resources.
Personalised onboarding based on individual behaviours and triggers. Daily check-ins tracking streaks and savings. Distraction tools for cravings. And a harm-minimisation approach that allows slip-ups without losing progress — designed around how quitting actually goes rather than an all-or-nothing model.
4,500 downloads in three months
4.7 App Store rating
#44 in Health & Fitness
