FIT & HIT
The Challenge
Despite the obsession with fitness in today's day and age, one of the biggest challenges that the tech savvy, time deficient fitness aspirants experience is the absence of a platform that will offer them an all round, holistic fitness plan while taking care of their special needs and requirements. People who have medical limitations, are pregnant, who cannot do certain exercises and eat certain foods find it tough to find a fitness app that will consider these limitations and give them a fitness regimen tailored around their needs. In addition to this, they have to switch between different apps that take care of different fitness aspects namely exercise, diet and lifestyle.
Objective
Explore the pain points of the fitness aspirants, where they feel the fitness apps today are failing to deliver what they expect from a fitness app that they will invest their time in.
Create an inclusive & intuitive platform to help people in their fitness journey & cater to their special & individual fitness needs.
My Role
UX Research / User Experience / User Interface Design
Conduct research using qualitative and quantitative techniques that include one on one interviews and followed by survey to help quantify the findings of the qualitative research.
Conduct competitive analysis of the popular competitors in the market followed by personas, user flows (user journey mapping).
Create information architecture followed by paper sketches (lo-fidelity prototypes) for design ideation.
Create mid fidelity prototypes on Balsamiq.
Create high fidelity prototypes on Sketch followed by prototype on InVision.
Tools Used
Balsamiq, Sketch, InVision
Understanding the Consumer
Qualitative & Quantitative Research
To understand why the fitness app consumers are dissatisfied with the apps currently available in the market I interviewed 12 fitness aspirants. The ideal candidates for the research included the people who use fitness apps / prefer using fitness apps over gyms but are unable to remain fit because the app doesn't provide them everything they need. The questions were framed to identify the users' goals, habits, motivations and challenges.
The qualitative research was followed by quantitative research in order to quantify the findings of the interview. The survey received 45 responses.
From there, I synthesized my insights into an affinity diagram and found the trends listed in the diagram.
Affinity Map
Competitor Analysis
To identify the competitive gaps and potential differentiators a competitor analysis of the existing fitness applications was conducted. The most popular fitness apps currently available in the market that were considered for the analysis included:
MyFitnessPal
MapMyFitness
SleepCycle
(The features marked as red are the deciding features that, as per the research were critical to users' satisfaction with a fitness app.)
Persona
The findings of the research led to the identification and creation of three major user groups:
Fitness Aspirants who are old
Fitness Aspirants who have medical limitations
Fitness Aspirants with a busy schedule
With these three user groups, the three personas Michael, Kayla and David, representing these user groups were created. Personas helped in creating a deeper and better understanding of the three target user groups, the challenges they face and what it is that they expect out of their ideal fitness application.
Ideation
The idea was to create an application that would serve as one stop fitness stop for all the fitness needs of the aspirants. The application would allow users to create, follow and customize their diet and workout plans while helping them keep track of their health in terms of helping them keep track of their sleep pattern and water intake, steps taken in a day to their heart rate.
Product Decomposition
Customizable dashboard for the user to be able to select the areas of improvement they would like to keep track of.
Ability to obtain workout and diet plans, ability to build them from scratch or modify them based on their individual needs and constraints (physical or medical).
Calorie and vitals tracker - manual inputs from users as well as barcode scanning and ingredients' visual image recognition.
Keep track of the progress made in the fitness journey, on a regular basis to stay motivated through the means of progress reports,
Information Architecture
Information architecture of the application was created to identify menu, which features and functions will be grouped together and how they will come together to give shape to the entire application.
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Low Fidelity Paper Sketches
I created lo-fidelity paper sketches of the various workflows of the application. This workflow indicates how the user can customize their dashboard to display the fitness factors that they want to keep a track of. The idea behind this is to get rid of the generic dashboard displays that overload the users with information that isn't useful or valuable for the user.
Mid-Fidelity Mockups and Storyboarding on Balsamiq
To get a deeper insight into the workflow, I converted the paper sketches into mid fidelity mock ups using Balsamiq. I also did storyboarding to help create a better understanding of the workflow.
This is the mock up of dashboard customization
High Fidelity Mockups
High Fidelity mock ups of the design for the desktop version of the app were created using Sketch.
Takeaways & Learnings
User research emerged to be of extreme importance in order to understand the real challenges of users who are regular users of fitness applications, Data received from research helped in identifying the three primary user groups or personas that experience similar problems but in a different way because of different problems and needs from fitness applications.
Creating personas helped get a better understanding of individual needs and expectations from an ideal fitness application and how incorporating these features can help all three user groups achieve their fitness goals.