Getting better each day, one step at a time.

PRODUCT DESIGN FOR MOBILE APP

ONE STEP BETTER

Keeping up with new health goals is an incredibly hard struggle for the majority of people. A lack of engagement, motivation, and interest leads to most people losing consistency over time.

Despite flashy apps with intense goals, this problem persists and most users will fall off fitness/wellness apps within the first three months. These outcomes suggest that there is a problem with user engagement and consistency with health/wellness apps.

The challenge was to find a messaging solution to improve continued engagement with fitness/wellness app usage.

CHALLENGE

We used a design-sprint approach to get initial insights and then progressed through evaluation-heavy research and human focused design approaches, using qualitative and quantitative data to reduce risk.

One Step Better is a location-aware app that connects users to local or global workouts with a unique reward system, solving a need for users to maintain engaged.

SOLUTION

Information gathering, competitor and user research and evaluation, and product design during all phases of the product’s development.

MY ROLE

TIMELINE

2 months

RESEARCH

Competitive Research

Competitive research was conducted on similar 3 platforms: Fitlist, Nike Run Club, and Productive were the most relevant to study and compare.

Informative Survey Questionnaire

Surveys (8) were used to determine pain points and user behavior towards fitness/wellness apps, and designs were usability tested (5) with wireframes and high fidelity prototypes.

87% of users stopped using their fitness/habit tracking app after 3 months

Excited and anxious were the main feelings users felt while using their apps

How Might We Questions

The most important HMQ questions will guide the further design process and decision making. These questions allowed us to think of ways to solve these problems in particular. 

How might we encourage users to keep using our app over a long period of time?

How might we make the experience of habit logging and sharing more fun?

How might we ease the process of sharing progress with others?

Proposal of an online community that (3 main ideas):

  1. Allows users to track and set personal health/wellness goals 

  2. Allows users to share their progress within or outside the app

  3. Allows users to message other users within the app

User Flows

User flows were used to determine critical pathways that a user would need to follow to complete a desired task. These tasks allowed us to solidify our navigation pathways and discover if they were intuitive or not, as well as understand the user’s journey. The two most critical pathways were logging an activity and sharing a completed task.

IDEATE

Wireframes

Using information found in our competitive research and survey, initial wireframes were constructed.

Design Standards and UI Elements

UI elements and standards were created to have a consistent theme and color scheme within the app. This design choice helps create a cohesive product design and ease the user experience with visual clarity. This gave the product design team a common source to refer to for design styles and standards.

IMPLEMENT

High Fidelity Mockups and Prototyping

(2 rounds of testing)

High fidelity mockups were created and the designer then completed tasks and checked if the prototype ran smoothly. The prototype of the high fidelity mockups was tested more thoroughly in moderated usability tests (2 rounds).

Outcomes and Lessons Learned  

LESSONS LEARNED

  1. Initial focus directed toward messaging should have been the main focus of prototyping screens. 

  2. If multiple users have the same issue, it is a design flaw that needs to be adjusted accordingly and then retested. 

  3. Users don’t want to hear about a function, they want to discover the function themselves and see it work in action (at least during prototype user testing).

GOALS ACHIEVED 

A working prototype to a solvable issue was developed and tested on multiple users over the course of its development, providing the end result with a successful health/wellness app that introduced a form of in-app messaging and sharing results, which will hopefully cause users to use the app more consistently and increase the duration of app engagement throughout time. Additionally, users were able to share results of goals achieved within the app and invite others to join a class with them.