Movement

Case study in creating a personalized fitness app for busy millennials.


Project Brief

Create a fitness app for millennials who want specialized, adventurous, and unique fitness activities. Address an unmet problem by learning more about millennials’ needs, goals, motivations, and frustrations around health and fitness.

Movement AppCase study in creating a personalized fitness app for busy millennials.

Research & Discovery

Understanding the Scope

We started with research in order to challenge our assumptions and to learn more about millennials demographic

Are millennials actually interested in specialized, unique fitness activities?

What sort of motivations and needs do millennials have surrounding health and fitness?

 

Competitive Analysis

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Direct Competitors

Muscle Booster, Aaptiv, Classpass, NTC

Indirect Competitors Instagram, Calm, Youtube, Reflectly

Indirect Competitors

Instagram, Calm, Youtube, Reflectly

 
 

Takeaways

From our research, we have deduced that the market is saturated with fitness & wellness apps that help users do fitness exercises, find variety, and many of them include stat trackers and have social components.

Opportunities

Our research found that competitors do "too much", which is overwhelming - and likely adds to the cost of their services - so doing "just enough" is actually the key differentiator.

We can differentiate by creating a specialized & focused fitness app. Differentiating on UI can also be a draw for users.

We also have to meet our user’s expectations with scheduling, stat and goal tracking, and possibly including a social component.

Survey

We conducted a survey to gather quantitative data about what sort of devices millennials like to use, what sort of priorities do they have, and what sort of activities to they do to stay healthy.

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*Example from one our survey results

*Example from one our survey results

Our survey results showed that millennials are more likely to use a mobile app. Millennial users are interested in staying healthy, but also want to have fun while exercising. The insights we got from our survey were used in connection with the qualitative data we gathered from our user research in order to form design decisions based on user research.

User Research Interviews

We interviewed 12 potential users in order to gain specific insight into how millennials prefer to exercise, how they schedule it, and their motivations and frustrations.

 

Insight #1

Millennials like to keep their exercises interesting and are always looking for new ways to work out. They engage in multiple different fitness activities.

“I like to diversify my workouts by always researching to try out new stuff”

- Nicole, 27, NYC


Insight #2

Our users have have a structured, disciplined fitness routine—working out 3 to 4 times a week.


 

Insight #3

Users are overwhelmed with too much health and fitness information. Research is time-consuming! They don’t know which content is relevant to them personally.

“I’m frustrated by wasting time searching for workouts on Google”

- Luke, 31, Chicago

Synthesis

Defining the Problem

Now that we have our data from our research, we synthesized our results through Affinity Diagramming. We then created a Persona to best understand our target audience and a Problem Statement in order to address what we will solve for our users.

With the problem defined, we created User Stories to further understand the problem by placing our user in context and created Design Principles to keep our team aligned.

Research Artifacts

Persona & User Stories

From our user interviews, exploratory research, and survey, we were able to hone into the main goals and concerns, of our target millennial user.

Creating a persona helped us visualize and further emphasize with the user we were designing for.

Creating a persona helped us visualize and further emphasize with the user we were designing for.

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In addition to a persona, we wrote user stories to provide further context around our users’ needs, motivations, and wants.

 

Problem Statement

To further narrow our scope we synthesized what we will address in this problem statement

Fitness-focused millennials want a fast and credible tool that allows them to get tailored workouts based on their preferences, because they’re frustrated with unreliable and time consuming information overload. 

Ideation & Evaluation

Solving the problem through ideation and concept testing

Now that we understand the market, the user, and the problem we want to solve. We brainstormed ways that could we could address the problem with a mobile app, and tested these ideas with users. We then evaluated our apps through priority matrixes in order to choose which ideas to include in a converged design.

Rapid Ideation

6-8-5 Sketching

As a team we brainstormed individually and together.

How can we address our user’s needs while also creating an app that is a market differentiator?

Some of my ideas and notes from a 6-8-5 sketch

Some of my ideas and notes from a 6-8-5 sketch

Divergent Concepts

 

Rapid Prototyping

After evaluating our ideas for feasibility and the ability to address our users’ needs, we were each assigned a divergent concept. I was assigned to test the concept of personalization through sequential choice.

The value proposition is that personalization allows us to address our user by recommending credible exercises depending on different types of fitness goals they have, the user’s schedule, their location, and fitness equipment available to them. It also offers users a limited amount of fitness choices, which is a market differentiator.

User flow for a personalized workout app

User flow for a personalized workout app

My wireframes for the divergent concept

My wireframes for the divergent concept

Evaluation & Convergence

User Testing and Analysis

We evaluated our concepts through user testing and priority matrixes

“I like how the location recommendations gave me new ideas for exercising”

-Chris, 29, Brooklyn

Users liked features that are both differentiated and personalized such as workouts based off of preference choice, which confirmed personalization as direction to take in the app.

The concepts we decided to develop into a converged prototype

1. Personalized recommendations

2. Location based exercises

3. Ability to edit fitness preferences 

An app map  helped us to refine the user flow

An app map helped us to refine the user flow

Solution

Movement

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Converged Prototype

Taking the best user tested ideas from our two divergent concepts, we combined them into a converged design.

This is a prototype for a personalized and adaptive fitness app that caters at home exercises and nearby fitness classes according to the user’s fitness goals and preferences.

 

Solving our users’ needs

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1. Personalization at onboarding

The first time user is given the chance to personalize their fitness preferences in on boarding. Users are asked about fitness priority, environment, and equipment they prefer to use.

They are also given the option to skip, because they can change their preferences in Profile.

 
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2. Limited choice at homepage

In order to differentiate between other fitness apps and to reduce browsing time for users, we decided to create a limited number of fitness options for the user that is catered to their preferences.

 
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3. Personalization a tap away

The user is always presented with the opportunity to changing preferences in the exercise, so the app is always personalized to them.

Users can change the duration, focus, intensity, and add equipment.

Conclusion

Test and Reiterate, and Again!

After we created our converged design, we tested it with users again in a usability test. Here are some more findings for what is successful and what could be improved.

Navigation Tests

Card Sorting


Future Recommendations

  1. Further user testing with adjustments to visual hierarchy to improve user experience so it is more streamlined.

  2. Content and typefaces will be tested based off of what increases navigability.

  3. The words chosen for filters, categories, and icons for bottom navigation will be further tested to ensure it is intuitive for users.