Bridges

Product Designer for Challenge-based Fitness Mobile App

Click here to interact with final prototype

Roles

UX Research
UI Design
Branding
Illustration

Tools Used

Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Marvel
Miro

Date

Aug 2022–Sep 2022

Framework

Design Thinking Process

Design

Malewicz' Neumorphism

Newly designed logo represents the desire to form "Bridges" between disparate groups or people.

Goals

Build a fitness app optimized for

- Sustained engagement
- Repeat usage

Background

The product manager for Bridges, a fitness-tracking app, wants to build a new social messaging function to share fitness goals and achievements.

Target Audience

18-34 years old
Tech-savvy
Budget-conscious
Messaging and communicating with friends and family is very important

Research

Hypothesis

If users can message their friends or family in their fitness app, it will increase engagement and repeat usage.

Research Questions

What are existing features that users like to use most in their fitness apps?
How should the messaging be integrated with these features?

Competitor Analysis

I wanted to investigate how popular fitness apps currently integrate social functions within their experience. I chose fitness apps with the highest reviews:

From looking at these apps, I've discovered that these were are the most common social features:

Community: find groups, find people, forum posts
Post-activity share
Add/Find/Refer friends
User profiles with achievements
Challenges

User Survey

I distributed a user survey to find interview participants to discover aspects of fitness apps they use the most.

According to response to the question, "For which purpose(s) do you use your fitness app(s)?", social sharing is not a function that most people use, so I wanted to dig deeper about why this might have been the case.

User Interviews

I conducted research from five 30-minute semi-structured interviews, focused on answering the following questions.

What are the top features of a fitness app most commonly used?
Do users prioritize engaging their friends, family, or others in fitness? If so, which ways do they prefer to do this?
What are some pain points?

Findings from User Interviews

In sum, the hypothesis is shown to be inconclusive. Users expressed that sharing activities is not often a pain point for fitness app users—it is finding a compelling reason to share.

In addition, social features could potentially be motivating for re-visiting a fitness app. Even though users primarily refer to apps for fitness programs and tracking, some users would like to have a way to passively or actively engage others in shared activities.

Research Synthesis

I created an affinity map to categorize recurring topics and uncover key insights to generate my personas.

See full affinity map on Miro

Personas

I used the above research to develop personas to describe the target audience of the Bridges app. This helps me to identify their behaviors and motivations.

Key Insights

Challenges provide a shared goal and can be motivating.
Fitness is the most engaging as a social experience (like rock climbing, hockey with friends).
Incentives and rewards can add moments of delight.
Competition (as a leaderboard or ranking system) can be motivating.
Fitness apps can be a way to keep in touch with others for accountability towards health goals.

Users want free or low-cost, non-intrusive apps. They also don't want to feel "tricked" into paying.
Apps can be seen as a source of authority. Users value this coaching / leadership.
Many use the high-level activity stats to track daily health maintenance and reach health goals.

Using these key insights, I re-framed our problem statement: How might we…

…better motivate users to interact socially on a daily basis?

…allow users to easily invite others to events or challenges?

…have users maintain progress with the app?

…allow users to engage in friendly competition with others?

How did we address these issues?

The Solution: A fitness app based on the concept of completing challenges with friends to earn rewards. Features include:

✔️ Track baseline fitness app stats, like steps, calories, and distance

✔️ Join personal or community-based virtual challenges

✔️ Invite friends to challenges, chat, and share gifts

✔️ Earn rewards, like event tickets, gift cards, and achievement badges

Time to start designing!

💡 I decided to develop one critical user flow: joining a challenge. During the flow, I wanted to optimize the number of social touchpoints in each page to encourage social interaction.

Low-fidelity Wireframes & Usability Study

I created an interactive paper prototype using Procreate for iPad and Marvel App. After conducting one round of user research on five testers, I implemented a few changes as I created the wireframes on Figma.

Click through carousel to see iteration between v0 (Marvel) to v1 (Figma).

Click through carousel to see iteration between v1 (Figma) to v2 (Figma).

Brand Platform

Purpose

We aim to inspire people to participate in activities with friends and community to build healthier habits

Brand Attributes

Trustworthy, motivational, delightful

Brand Personality

Trusted coach who will encourage and hold users accountable to building habits towards better health

Style Guide

Bridges: Style Guide

High-fidelity Wireframes & Usability Study

Then I built a final hi-fi prototype with the new UI guidelines and feedback from a round of user testing. Following are examples of common findings.

Click through carousel to see iteration between v2 (Figma) to v3 (Figma).

Learnings

Since I was given this problem scenario, I was able to focus on developing a solution.

The scenario was that the product manager of this fitness app wanted to add a messaging feature to (1) sustain engagement and (2) increase repeat usage.

However, if this were a real-life scenario, I would conduct UX research to test that hypothesis before spending resources to develop a messaging feature.

In my interviews, I did corroborate that including a messaging feature would likely have inconclusive results on the business objectives.

But since I was building this app from scratch, I wanted to design it to provide users compelling reasons to want to message their friends in-app, so I designed it around the concept of "Challenges" in which users can participate with their friends to earn rewards.

If this app were to be developed, we would want to keep a close pulse on user engagement statistics and iteratively gamify the app to encourage engagement.

Next Steps

For future development, the Bridges app would include the following features:

Real-life community-hosted challenges
More challenges containing fitness programming
More nudges to remind users to participate in challenges
Ability to sync with smartwatches or other fitness apps