It is easy to assume your users are just like you. As practitioners of user centred design and advocates for users, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not our typical user. Building empathy for our users in order to effectively improve their lives means understanding their hopes, fears, limitations and goals (Gibbons, 2019). Understanding our users on a deeper, more emotional level, and knowing what motivates them, along with frustrations they may feel, is crucial to creating persuasive and delightful experiences (Caddick & Cable, 2011). In order to build the right solution, it is important to empathise with user frustrations in emotional terms first, before even thinking about product features, to really uncover their internal needs, desires and triggers (Eyal, 2014). We want to solve a user’s paint points so that the user sees our solution as their source of relief.
In order to better emotionally journey with my users and enable cognitive empathy, I created a persona. A solid persona is based on tasks, behaviours and attitudes instead of demographics (Caddick & Cable, 2011). Personas are fictional archetypes based on our user research that we describe as if they were real individuals and help to prevent us from trying to design for everyone (Harley, 2015).
Using insights and data collected in my interviews and user research last week, I went about drafting my persona. It was fun to personify patterns I had identified from my research. My affinity mapping really facilitated this process as I had already identified clusters of shared attitudes and behaviours.
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I conducted an additional interview since the synthesis of my research last week, which I will also build into my persona once I have analysed the transcript. I plan to hold more interviews as I progress in building out this design to enrich my process. According to Caddick and Cable (2011), personas are living documents which should be updated as continued research brings about new insights. In the coming weeks, as I learn more about users, I will edit my persona and iterate on it.
I started doing some competitive analysis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in the health and fitness app space. I was hoping to both identify gaps in the market that still haven’t been tapped into and was also looking for the similarities and differences of apps that exist currently.
I researched direct and indirect competitors and compiled a graph of the top four competitors, listing for each one what I perceived to be their pluses (what they are doing well) and deltas (things that could be improved and changed).
I also created a feature inventory framework to better visualise gaps and opportunities. I noted which apps have or don’t have each feature and also noted if they are available only to premium users who purchase a subscription (indicated by the padlock icons in the table below). I found it helpful to also analyse two indirect competitors. ‘Fastic’ is an intermittent fasting app that aims to encourage holistic health. ‘Fabulous’ uses behavioural science to motivate users to build healthy habits.
From my research I noticed that leading fitness tracking apps lack features that include supportive and encouraging aspects for users in order to keep them motivated. Perhaps the rationale behind this is that stats will be enough to keep users coming back. Features for setting goals and tracking habits are either very limited and not very customisable or completely hidden to new users behind a paywall. Similarly, users typically don’t get much help at all in terms of suggestions for walking/jogging routes near them, which may be a barrier preventing them from getting up and moving more. Most fitness apps do not encourage a holistic approach to fitness and do not offer articles, tips and insights about the many facets of health.
I decided to map out the flow a user would take in order to track an activity in a fitness app given that having the ability to track activities was a common goal identified in my research.
Buley (2013) emphasises how, instead of attempting to stitch together a sprawling flow that encompasses a whole product or system, we should focus on drafting distinct flows for core scenarios, as this allows us to get key threads of the user experience as fluid and tight as possible.
User flows help us to visualise the flow through a solution and all possible interactions with the product but, unlike user journey maps, they don’t focus on users’ feelings and instead focus on paths, decisions and loops (Thalion, 2018).
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I focused on what the goal of the particular flow was, who is going through the flow and how they would do it. In this way I was able to communicate a clearer story and I believe that splitting key flows based on user goals will help me design from their perspective. I plan to make an onboarding flow and a habit tracking flow to tackle more user goals.
Buley, L. (2013). The User Experience Team of One. Rosenfeld.
Caddick, R. and Cable, S. (2011) Communicating the User Experience : A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation. John Wiley & Sons.
Eyal, N. (2014) Hooked : how to build habit-forming products. London, England: Penguin Books.
Gibbons, S. (2019) “Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX,” Nielsen Norman Group. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/sympathy-vs-empathy-ux/ (Accessed: February 8, 2022).
Harley, A. (2015) “Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members,” Nielsen Norman Group. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/ (Accessed: February 9, 2022).
Thalion (2018) “User Journey Maps or User Flows, what to do first?” Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/user-journey-maps-or-user-flows-what-to-do-first-48e825e73aa8 (Accessed: February 11, 2022).
