Case study

Role
Product design
User Research

Year
‍2022

Active

Mobile app to help people prioritise their health by making exercising and implementing good habits easy and unintimidating.

Case study

Active

Role: Sole product designer (UXD MA project)

Timeline: 12 weeks

Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, ProtoPie

Mobile app to help people prioritise their health by making exercising and implementing good habits easy and unintimidating.

The problem

Too many people lead sedentary lives.

Inactivity has negative consequences on both our physical and mental health. The pandemic has led to increasingly sedentary lifestyles worldwide. The question was - How can we get people moving and prioritising their wellbeing?

the Solution

Help people ease into exercise and track healthy habits.

Ease into fitness with route suggestions

Conveniently foster a regular exercise habit with nearby route suggestions and live directions
Filter routes by time and distance so you can schedule movement breaks throughout your day

Set and stick to custom healthy goals and habits

Set up your own fully customisable habits and goals
Stay motivated by checking off your goals as you complete them each day

Visually track your progress

Remain inspired by visually tracking your progress across days, weeks and months
Reinforce and celebrate positive behaviours

Initial hypothesis

Encouraging progress above competitiveness and results could lead to higher long-term user retention rates in the digital fitness and health space.

People who are unfit and want to change their lifestyle can feel intimidated by how most leading solutions currently are positioned.

Research

Following the initial problem discovery and preliminary research, I surveyed 121 participants, of which:

felt that tracking their progress would help them exercise more

would like to build healthier habits

felt that lack of motivation prevents them from exercising more

User interviews

I wanted to hear first-hand about people's experiences and attitudes toward health and fitness to design a solution for their needs.

Having the ability to track activities and habits was a common goal expressed by my interviewees.

key themes + insights

After synthesising and processing the interview data points collected using affinity mapping, three key themes became apparent:

Theme 1:

Tracking progress

Visually tracking progress motivates users

People have analogue ways of tracking progress and habits

Theme 2:

Setting goals

The act of marking a task as 'done' is a reward in itself

Setting and achieving goals helps people to stay motivated

Theme 3:

Easing into fitness

People want help finding routes to walk near them

Walking is perceived as one of the best ways to start a fitness journey

competitive analysis

The digital health and fitness space is very saturated. I wanted to explore leading competitors to note their strengths and what could be improved.

The competition's features for tracking goals and habits were either non-existent, not customisable or hidden behind a paywall.

Additionally, new users were offered little to no assistance finding routes near them on which to exercise.

Usability testing + design improvements

I continually iterated on early prototypes based on peer reviews and feedback, along with rounds of usability testing with target users.

Home page optimised to prompt user action

I reduced the home page's visual clutter and the number of options presented to the user. A clear call-to-action to begin a workout was added to get users moving quicker.
These changes proved to help new users discover and explore the app's features more effectively as they naturally flowed to the workout tracking page over 6x faster during testing.

Advanced goal/ habit customisability

Initial testing revealed users felt limited by the original version of the "add new goal" screen, implying that it didn't offer enough customisability.
Not every habit needs to be completed every day. Following designs accommodated for these edge cases, allowing users to assign habits to specific days of the week.

Replacing social feed with learning-centred content

Original designs featured a social feed where people would be shown activity updates from other users.
User feedback suggested that seeing updates from other users might lead to comparison and competitiveness, taking the focus away from individual journeys and goals.

design system