Healthub
Designing a product to track and share health and fitness
What is the key for driving user engagement and retention on fitness applications?
Objective & Goals
For a well-established, yet faux, friends and family health tracking app, the answer is simple: encouragement through messaging. As the sole UX Designer, my objectives and goals are as follows:
Objective:
Integrate messaging within an existing app.
Goals:
Create the opportunity for users to message each other with fitness goals/achievements.
Create an integrated messaging experience throughout the product.
I created a research plan to investigate existing fitness and messaging applications and spoke to users of existing fitness and messaging applications about their favorite parts of these apps.
The main goal was to determine if healthy competition and prolonged usage would be promoted if personalized messages can be sent through the app.
After speaking to various users and comparing many health applications such as Nike Run Club and Strava, as well as messaging within iMessage and Instagram, I compiled a list of my app’s “must-haves”.
Discover
Interaction with a post or message
A common denominator with all apps that were investigated.
Predictive text
Integrate the ability to send pre-determined encouraging messages.
Seeing friends fitness progress
A new feature to encourage healthy competition and motivation for other users.
Design & Validate
I developed a set of four user flows which I felt identified the red routes of the messaging portion of the app.
A user checking their un-read messages
A user sending a direct message to another user
A user sending a motivational comment to another user
A user reviewing their friends or family group’s workouts for the week.
Using these user flows and the few wireframes provided by the faux app company, I developed low-fidelity prototypes to perform usability studies on. I tested 5 participants that fit the target user and settled with 3 takeaways:
Station a Group icon/button on bottom navigation
Since Groups are a main function of the application, they should be stationed somewhere where they’re always accessible.
Add both text and icons to bottom navigation
Provides easier usability.
Add a button for a user to begin a workout
In order for a user to comment on or encourage a friend or family member, they need to be able to log their workouts first.
Taking the key takeaways, I began to create a style guide and develop my high fidelity designs. I chose a warm color scheme and rounded icons to match the brand’s personality and attributes. I also added a gradient to the color scheme to encourage motivation, such that as a color can go from one to another, a person can similarly evolve!
Brand personality
A trusted friend with a good sense of humor who always has your best interest in mind.
Brand Attributes
Contemporary, trustworthy, humorous, and motivational.
Target User
A tech-savvy, budget-conscious, 18-34 year old.
I performed a second usability test with 5 new users. I asked them to navigate through the app, requesting they perform very intricate tasks such as finding their longest logged run and sharing the run with a group they’re in. In between these tasks, I would ask the participant if they had any thoughts on the screens.
Customizable screens to cater to the user
The use of customizable screens will allow the user options, therefore increasing the likelihood of the user returning to the app since its personalized to their wants.
Sorting capabilities for faster review
If a user can see their friend’s or family’s progress in a more straightforward way, such as workouts broken out by week or month, it can provide a way for natural encouragement.
Conclusion
Since this app is not available in the App Store, there is no true way of telling if my updates will increase engagement and user retention, however, I would like to believe it does. During the usability studies, multiple people commented on how inclusive and friendly certain screens, like the group feed screen, is.
From personal experience, the more that I can do within the app, and the more friends I have on the app, the more I would use the app.
Facebook, for example, has billions of users, and most of their purpose for using the app is to stay in touch with people in their life and community. The more groups that a person is a part of, and the more friends a person has, the more they’re likely to go into the app to check in on how things are going. Personally, I had a group for everything - birthdays, event planning, you name it - and the more groups I was a part of, the more often I checked the app, therefore increasing the app’s engagement and my retention.
If I had more time I’d like to keep testing this app with users. I’d like to focus on A/B testing to see if a user is more likely to add a comment through the comment icon or the comment link, for example. I’d also like to play around with the brand’s colors and see if I can find additional ways to implement the warm tones within the app.
All icons are credited to the artists at The Noun Project.