Mobile App - Fantasy Fitness
THE CONTEXT
Fantasy Fitness is a mobile health app that allows users to workout with a group of friends or family. The application’s goal is for users to interact and motivate each other to reach their fitness goals.
User’s are able to view each other's profile which includes their goals and progress. Fantasy Fitness does not have a messaging feature that enables communication between the users.
THE OBJECTIVE
Re-design Fantasy Fitness to include a more engaging format by incorporating gameology and an efficient messaging system that allows users to communicate with each other through the app.
Equally important is that the focus of the app remains on fitness and collaborating with each other to reach personal goals and hit milestones.
EMPATHIZE
THE COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
Existing health apps prioritize logging workouts, logging meals, and keeping health journals. Messaging in competitive apps is inconsequential. Making interaction a secondary action can make the user’s health journey a lonely one.
NIKE RUN APP:
Pros
Clean UI that is aesthetically pleasing and inviting at face value
Inclusivity, users from around the world can post on the chat
Scrolling through the posts is easy and entertaining
Cons
Chat is hidden and difficult to find
Group fitness challenges don’t promote a conversation forum
Adding friends allows you to view each other’s progress, but not communicate
MAP MY RUN APP:
Pros
Discussion tab in on bottom navigation bar
Users can engage with posts
Option to engage in general discussion or create subgroups
Posting acts as accountability, user can post when they complete a workout
Cons
In order to post on the chat you must complete a workout. If you are looking for motivation to do your workout you don’t have option to post
Posts can be lengthy
Lengthy post take long to scroll through, decreasing engagement with older posts
The USER RESEARCH
I recruited 7 qualified individuals who have experience using apps for fitness. The interviews were conducted in person. Notes were taken down using pen, paper, and some participants consented to voice recordings.
The goal of the interviews were to hear from the users themselves what features were appreciated on the fitness apps and which were more difficult to navigate. A second goal of the in person interviews was to inquire about their favorite leisure messaging apps.
By analyzing participant’s responses and their behavior during the interviews I was able to identify key pain points and user desires.
Below are notable participant quotes that were referenced during the redesign of Fantasy Fitness.
USER INTERVIEW TAKEAWAYS
When using a fitness app user’s feel engaged if…
… there’s moral support
… there’s external motivation
… they are being held accountable
… there are interactive elements
… logging and communicating with others
DEFINE
THE PROBLEM
Collaboration between users is a brand staple of Fantasy Fitness. Unfortunately users can only view each other’s goals and progress, but there is no way to send encouraging or motivational messages to each other.
The current Fantasy Fitness design needs to be updated to include a messaging system and a rebranding that retains users past the current 3 week estimate.
User research revealed that persons using apps like Fantasy Fitness want community support in the form of COMMUNICATION, COOPERATION, and an app that is more ENGAGING.
IDEATE
THE CONCEPT
In person interviews revealed that user’s felt more motivated and more likely to continue using a fitness app if there is a strong community presence that helps hold them accountable to achieve their goals. User’s also stated that they prefer quick interactions that don’t feel burdensome to participate in.
Analyzing the competitive and user research findings I made the choice to redesign Fantasy Fitness to include gamification. The gamification would make interactions quick, fun, and increase motivation to use the app long-term.
Fantasy Fitness was redesigned to be a friendly health competition. The user can create or join teams with their friends, family, or miscellaneous app users. The users are paired up against an opponent and the goal is to earn points by completing your personal fitness milestones. The user points are added to the corresponding team’s total. The team with the most points wins the weekly challenges.
The redesign allows users to private message encouraging messages to their team members and to participate in a team and league feed where they can post about their workouts and upcoming fitness events.
Anthony, our user persona, is now more likely to stay motivated and continue using Fantasy Fitness to reach his fitness goals. Alex offers moral support to his team members through private messages, he is able to post about his own progress on the team feed, and he can meet up with local users to work out by locating them on the map.
Fantasy Fitness was transformed from a physical fitness app to a community health app. The redesign will increase success and user retention.
THE USER FLOW
The user flow was drafted with the user persona and research findings in mind as a skeleton for sketching the wireframes. I focused on the top 3 priorities:
Communication - An intuitive and efficient messaging system will be incorporated for users to maintain communication. In this manner users can motivate each other and offer moral support.
Cooperation - By creating teams the app and fitness journey will feel like a community effort. This will generate a sense of external accountability and motivation.
Recruit - Designing an easy and quick way to share profiles will increase app downloads and the likelihood that users will return continuously to the app because their friends and family are using it too.
THE WIREFRAMES
In sketching out the wireframes I placed my top priorities in re-designing a system that was uncomplicated, clear, and concise. Anthony (user persona) is a competitive person who has specific fitness goals and seeks community support to reach those.
Fantasy Fitness is an application whose main goal is to bring friends and family together to help support each other in their fitness journey. Anthony needs a way to communicate with his fitness team/ community that is simple and does not become oversaturated with content. Second, having a way to connect with other app users in the area will increase Anthony’s motivation to remain consistent with his fitness goals.
Posts should be quick to write, easy to read and react, and focused on fitness. A 140 character limit will keep the conversations focused.
Users will be more likely to engage with the posts if there are limited action options: react and/ or repost, no comments section.
Users can get inspiration through map check ins.
Private encouragement messages can be sent through user profiles.
Encouragement messages are available in 3 formats: video, photo, voice record.
Limiting text interactions allows for more engagement and higher motivation for users to return to the app for fitness purposes.
The redesign of Fantasy Fitness required a rebranding. I designed a logo that encompassed the goal and method. The “F” in “Fitness” is inverted to face off against the fantasy alluding to the gamification of the fitness challenge. The green colors were chosen to mimic the turf of a sports field and complemented with pops of pink.
PROTOTYPE
COMMUNICATION
Users can communicate with each other through a group chat in the Team and/ or League Feed. The interaction is designed to be quick with a 140 character limit and the option to react and repost only. Users don’t have the option to comment on individual posts. This way the conversation is focused and cooperative.
A location feature was added to the posts as well with the intention that users will be inclined to organize group workouts or share fitness classes or places to expose others to them.
The communication will increase collaboration and motivation for users to return to use the app.
COOPERATION
The map feature in Fantasy Fitness encourages cooperation between team members. The pinned check-ins motivate users to go out and complete their workouts as well. The pins also allow users to discover new ways/ new places to workout.
The map creates a tangible fitness community and the feeling of solidarity. Users like Anthony (user persona) who struggle with consistency will be motivated to push himself to stay on track because he sees that his teammates have completed or are in the process of completing their workouts.
Cooperation increases the likelihood of continued participation and engagement on Fantasy Fitness.
ENCOURAGEMENT
Personalized/ private encouraging messages increases the sense of community and cooperation. Sending a video, photo, or voice message increases familiarity. The format makes it less of a task and more of a fun feature.
Users like Anthony can message his teammates personalized messages encouraging them to complete their workouts and meet their goals.
The CTA button that states "Encourage" will command the users attention and motivate them to explore and use the feature.
INCREASE RETENTION
In order to increase retention I designed a quick way to share your personal user code. The user code is easy to share with friends and family so you can build a community around health.
TEST
The participants were prescreened and met qualifications such as having previous experience using fitness apps, were within the age range of 22-35, and engaged in physical fitness on a regular basis.
Because of a last minute technical failure on my personal iPhone, which was to be used for testing, I made the decision to have the participants test the app on a mac laptop, suspending their reality that they would be using this on a phone.
The participants were labeled as P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5. All interviews were conducted in person. I recorded findings using pen and paper and with the permission of participants took some photographs during testing.
TAKEAWAYS
Cons:
Messaging feed wallpaper is “too bright” (P3) and “distracting” (P2).
Homepage is “very green” (P3).
All users confused the medal for a sun. Users failed to identify what the medal was indicating.
Users agreed that the workout page looks unfinished.
Splash page was lacking.
Pros:
“This is so cool! Where can I use this?” (P1)
“When will this be running?” (P5)
Users were enthusiastic about the gamification of this fitness app.
The private video messaging feature elicited positive reactions.
Users liked and stated they were highly likely to use the map/ location feature.
ITERATE
MESSAGING FEED
All 5 users indicated that the background of the feed was “too bright”, “distracting”, “too much”, and that it was “difficult to focus” on the messaging content because of the background.
Solution: Kept the background to have the company logo present, but lowered the saturation so it blends in like a wallpaper instead of pulling focus from the most important component, the chat.
SPLASH PAGE
Splash page was updated to incorporate the company name, logo, and dimension through color.
CLOSING THOUGHTS...
The gamification of Fantasy Fitness will increase user engagement. Users will feel more challenged, motivated, and supported in their goals by being part of a virtual fitness team.
The newly incorporated messaging system allows users to communicate with one another without pulling focus from the fitness goal and avoids turning Fantasy Fitness into a messaging app. It is clear that the chat room and the private messages are for community support and encouragement.
Users were excited to use the redesigned Fantasy Fitness app. All test participant's final commentary was probing of where and when they could use Fantasy Fitness.
In the future I'd like to test the iterated design on a larger population of users. I would like to see if the game is intuitive or if some education on functions would be needed upon initiating app.
I would like to test the color design further and gage how users feel about the tones or if they could be modified to make a larger impact.