Fitness Ecosystem — A UX Case Study
The process of analyzing and building a end to end fitness app solution
Who & Why
This project is for the client from Australia (details can’t be revealed because of his privacy concerns), who is the retired athletic and fitness enthusiastic over two decades. He approached us to develop a fitness app to help people for the better lifestyle. Also, to build a collaborative platform for the fitness trainers, product owners, and fitness avid to share, learn and gain at one place. However, he’s not certain about the market and solution necessity which he’s expected us to figure it out.
Market Synopsis & Thoughts
We’ve gone through the market research to understand how great the market is evolving and it gaps.
Fitness apps are all the rage today. According to recent research, 42% of smartphone or tablet owners use at least one fitness app. As wearable devices become more widespread and accessible, an increasing number of consumers is connecting their smart wearable s to apps with the aim of tracking their health and fitness. We recently witnessed an explosion of new products that promise to track steps or count calories to help users become fitter, stronger, and healthier.
1. The global fitness market is anticipated to grow at 23% CAGR during the forecast period.
2. For the survey, Flurry reviewed the health and fitness app industry based on app usage of over 1,000,000 apps across all app categories, providing insights into 2.1 billion devices.
3. However, the “general health” category revealed stagnation at 41 per cent in the last two years. It said wearable, such as fitness bands and smartwatches, will see a significant growth. According to the Gartner forecast, there would be over 310 million wearable’s sold in 2017, which would be an increase of 16.7 per cent to 2016.
Gathered this information from research portals (https://bit.ly/2KBenGl) and other resources.
By understanding this data we came to the conclusion that there is an immense business span to explore and at the same time there is a huge chance to make effective solutions.
Problem
All top Companies are coming with great technological and innovation programs to track and sense our health with great algorithms. However, many of these apps fail to maintain users attention in the long run.
“It’s a severe issue, over 5 million people vanish from causes associated with one of the most mundane scourges of the contemporary era: lying around. That’s like losing one Norway-sized country every 365 days to the likes of heart disease, diabetes, and bowel cancer -insanities linked to a lack of exercise” — a survey has revealed.
We are indolent when it comes to our fitness, Most of us push our self hard to stay fit (I’m not relating to PRO who are self-disciplined). Though we neglect it sometimes for no reasons. I know It depends on person to person and other priorities. Many of us will procure memberships, appoint personal trainers, other life improvement products. However, most of us will withdraw their interest over the period of time and eventually gave up.
After interpreting it in many aspects, we actually felt there is something dropping out there which must be sorted out!
Competitor Analysis
I researched/tested the leading apps that have already been in the market while cycling to work fitness, tracking, health and coaching apps like Fitbit, Strava, Couch to 5K, MyFitnessPal, Lifesum.
Design Approach
I’ve followed the IDEO’s Human-Centered Design and Lean UX Design Thinking process to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback. Design thinking approach helps to resolve issues outside of professional design practice, such as in business and social contexts.
Research
There are three types of people when it gets to the exercising or maintaining fitness
1. The fitness freaks who exercise all the time.
2. People who are curious to do easy-going walks whenever they can.
3. The people in between, always contradictory and try to explore for some motivation.
Most people I know will fall under the third portion, We can call them general users/customers to empathise, Also, the users in this segment will try hard to be disciplined on their fitness goals and feels very stressful over the period of time and eventually, often they will give up. These people need some solution to motivate them and create a feeling of happiness to reach their goals. Here I accurately tried to identify the pain points and come to the resolution with the great user research.
User Research
I’ve approached the Guerrilla research framework, Guerrilla research is a fast and low-cost way to gain sufficient insights to make informed decisions. I went to a few random people and places with my colleague to meet people explaining my project details also expectations and started with casual questions and next to the main topics like :
1. What type of solutions they are currently using and how satisfied they feel using that on a daily basis?
2. How often do they user their Fitness activity App/ Devices?
3. I examined how well they are performing the tasks that will help them to reach their goals and take feedback on the pain points?
4. Asked the, Do often they like to be reminded to do a workout or not?
5. In Your Opinion, what is the best part of keeping or improving your health?
Many more questions
Also, Conducted an online survey to get to know their health practices and lifestyles, finally got an impressive data to connect the dots.
Analyzing Pain Points
The next date we studied the records of the research and listed down each user’s pain point onto a Post-It. Then I did the affinity mapping to classify the pain points into comparable divisions on a whiteboard. I noticed there were distinct types of people: those that are continuing a fitness program, those that are starting a fitness program and those that have never participated in fitness programs.
From all the research outcomes and deep understanding of data. We listed out a few things that are still backing.
Community support
Behaviour health has proven that without community support (friends, family, etc) you are going to be fighting an uphill battle. How can you surround yourself with people who are as motivated as you? Where can you share your successes? Also, the guidance of what and how to do a thing in the right way that leads to better results.
Automation
There is a complete lack of automation. Who wants to spend hours logging their food every day. I want an app that brings it all together.
Complexity
Many users are still in stigma to adapt to digital evolution-fitness and training’s thought there are some outstanding solutions on the market still there is complexity to adopt and utilize.
Persona
Anyway, with that comparable division, I created a persona that helps me to understand user behaviour, needs, and pain points. So that I could address them by creating Wireframes/prototype.
Ideation & Sketching
With all the required data I got, I started doing brainstorming on What? How? Why? by departing the user needs and pain points, I started doing sketching on white the paper and dug every corner of the detail and tried to put them into perspective. I came up with several inherent solutions to every pain points and made some rough drafts on paper to meet the clefts. Once I gained the clear roadmap that answers me to every problem, I decided to take those rough sketches to the next level by making the low fidelity wireframes that can give me the clear picture and faith that I’m on the superintendence towards solving the user needs.
Anyone would like to understand the flow and the process, Kindly contact me directly. I’m ready to provide more insights into the background of the solution.
Prototyping and Validation
After many series of usability tests with nearly 10 users, we got nearly 95% of acceptance with our solution. The feedback we’ve received is almost considered and allotted in the solution.
Summarising the solution
1. Basically, this app is kind of ecosystem that gather, analyse the information about the individual health condition among the connected devices/resources like trackers and smartwatches.
2. An algorithm that will analyse the individual information and recommend the health tips and fitness programmes.
3. This solution is a GPS-enabled fitness tracking application that allows busy people to quickly set exercise goals and conquer them with friends.
4. This solution is useful for fitness enthusiasts, gym trainers and product owners to collaborate and build their own kind.
5. The key feature is we made this app more pleasure to use and engineered to connect the fitness activity with more socialised interaction that will help to create an emotional impact on the user.
6. We tried to reduce all the pain points for the user and made it more compatible to use.
7. We made the goals creation steps more easy, as we received more concerns while we’re the doing usability tests from the users.
8. We prepared a perfect pathway to collaborate with other peer members to make healthy competition and beneficial associations from it.
Conclusion
From this case study, I once again learned the importance of not relying on my own assumptions when it comes to designing for others. As designer, it can be so easy to assume we know what is best for the product, but we need to remember that we aren’t designing for ourselves, but for our users.
Thanks for checking out my post! Please feel free to provide comments or feedback below — I’m always looking for ways to become a better designer! For more insights about the process and other information you can also shoot me a message at kiran9rathod@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.
