AGILITY CASE STUDY
Overview
The Problem
Fitness is not the easiest thing for people to get the hang of. Many find it hard to find the time, motivation, or will-power to get themselves up and active. Fitness app companies have been trying to understand the behavior of their users and why users lack engagement with their product.
Project Brief
This project will be covering how users interact with fitness based apps, what companies found from people using engaging apps, and how my findings will help improve the user’s experience with my new fitness app.
The Goal
My goal is to make users more engaged with a fitness app on a long term basis.
Responsibilities
User Research, User flow mapping, WireFraming, testing, and high fidelity designing
Research
Secondary Research
Summary
I did some secondary research on understanding the friction people had when reaching their exercise goal or routine. I reviewed documents and articles in order to understand how other companies were able to overcome similar challenges. I found that adding a social aspect to their product gave users longer engagement.
Top Learnings From Secondary Research
- Having less barriers makes it easier to workout
- Users are engaged after receiving rewards
- Big social media companies like Facebook use posts, stories, and direct messaging to engage users
- Companies try to use fitness watches to connect users
Surveys
Summary
I wanted to find participants to help me understand what users wanted from a fitness app.
Interview Requirements:
- Between 18 - 34 years of age
- Exercise at least 4 - 6 times a week
- Open and available to interview
Google Survey Outcomes
What is your age?
- 25 form submissions
- Majority of responders were between the ages of 22-26
How often do you exercise?
- Majority of the respondents exercised 4-6 times per week.
How do you update friends or family on your goals?
- Majority of people do not update friends or family on their exercise goals.
- Text Messaging and Apple Fitness were the other two main tools people used to update friends and family.
Outcome Summary
Based on the surveys, I can see:
- People’s exercise trends by age
- People who disregard sharing goals with friends and family.
- Motivation and time being a major factor for keeping people from exercising.
Key Findings From Survey
- Time
- Motivation
- Communication about fitness
Interviews
My Interviews Discussed:
- Motivations
- Necessities out of a fitness app
- Pain points regarding exercising
- Pain points achieving goals
- Pain points maintaining an exercise routine
Types of Participants
- Diverse group of participants
- Active weight lifters
- Long distance runners
- College/Post graduate students
- Participants who were tech savvy
Methods of interviewing
- Scheduled with Calendly
- Recorded off of Zoom
- Transcribed using Otter.ai
Interview Questions
- What are some goals you set for yourself and how do you attempt to achieve them?
- What are some pain points you have when trying to achieve your goals?
- What are some things you want out of an exercise app and how important are they to you?
- How important is sharing your results with friends/family, and why?
- What information would you expect to send to friends/family?
- What are some things that trigger you to exercise and why?
- What are some pain points you have when trying to maintain an exercise routine?
- Do you have any further comments about maintaining your exercise routine?
Key Findings From Responses
- It is important for users to be consistent.
- They want their fitness app to feel like a game with goals and rewards.
- The reason for working out is for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
- Maintaining a good workout routine is hard, especially if you do not see results.
- Seeing other people workout is a motivator.
- Keeping an open schedule is important for working out.
- The fitness app would be the one to notify them to keep working out.
- Consider having a performance tracker dashboard.
- Sharing goals and rewards are not important.
- Sharing general fitness content would be beneficial.
Affinity Map Categories
Research Analysis
Summary
Originally, my secondary research was geared towards messaging improving engagement for users, however, my interviewing data shows otherwise. I compared my results from surveys and interviews after reviewing my findings from my secondary research. The majority of the research focused on exercise engagement and fitness app engagement using a social media perspective.
They believed sharing goals and rewards engaged users to use a fitness app, however after interviewing with my participants I found that they would rather share useful content instead of messaging their personal goals. The secondary research, surveys, and interviews all agreed that barriers, such as time and alerts, affected motivation for people trying to maintain a fitness routine.
Key Learnings From Research
- Messaging general content to friend/family is preferred
- Gamification will be a good motivator for users
- Getting notified to do workouts is crucial to get in a exercise routine
Priorities
Engaging users with:
- Messaging to help improve engagement
- Motivating users with rewards
- Keeping users in an exercise habit using notifications
Ideate
Personas
User Flow
The flow of navigating around the app is important to understand before designing the app. This user flow was used to narrow down the primary path of the prototype. Here, you can see the main path being messaging, and the alternative routes are notifications and challenging others to competitions.
LoFi WireFrames
HiFi WireFrames
Design
Color Pallet
Typography
HiFi Design
Test
Script For Wireframe Testing
Messaging
- You and your gym buddy both decided to download this amazing fitness app called Agility. He sent you a message and he wants you to respond to him as soon as possible. Please navigate to the message page of the app.
- Your friend’s name is Marvin Jackson. Please select his name on the message page so that you can respond to him.
- As you can see on this message page, he wants you to send over an abs video. To do this you will need to go to the page where all your content is located. How might you go about doing that?
- Where would you find the abs video on this content page? Check to see if there are other avenues of retrieving the abs video.
- Once you see the abs video go ahead and select it on this video page.
- Continue to the page where you were sending the video to Marvin.
- Go ahead and send the message.
- Navigate back to the home page.
Achievements
- Now you have your notifications on for this fitness app to keep you up to date. Navigate to the area to check your notifications.
- Remove the top notifications.
- Remove the next notification.
- Navigate back to the homes page.
Further Feedback
Did you find anything worth mentioning about the design or the flow of navigating between page to page?
Figma WireFrame
User Feedback
- Users seem to have issues finding the “More” button to find the videos
- Home tab should be on the far left instead of the middle.
- Switch the message bubble with the notifications button.
- The “three dot” icon should be different. Maybe a paper clip or a list of types of files (photo icon, video icon, file icons, etc).
- My verbiage for the question about sending content to the friend was not clear for some people.
- I should have said attach a video instead of saying to go send the video.
- Users ended up leaving the message section entirely to find the video message section.
- They recommend changing the attachment symbol from the three linear dots to a paper clip.
- This will help users understand the functionality better.
- Have the Notifications take you to that area of the screen.
- Have the Notifications take you to that area of the screen.
Script For High Fidelity Testing
Messaging
- Your friend just downloaded the same fitness app as you and the app just notified you that he sent a message on the app. Please go check the notifications section for any new messages.
- As you can see there are two notifications for you. Please go ahead and select the first one from Marvin Jackson.
- Now go ahead and select him at the top of the screen.Read through the message chat and notice that he wants you to send over a video for him. Please go ahead and attach an “Abs” video for him.
- Select the correct video and continue over to the messaging page.
- Go ahead and send it.
Challenges
- Now you have to go check who challenged you on the app. It is a challenge request from one of your friends. Go to the notifications section on the app and check if you see the challenge notification.
- Go ahead and accept the challenge against Marvin Jackson.
- Go ahead and exit out of the pop up.
- Head back home
Figma Final Design
User Feedback
All of the participants enjoyed the design and were easily able to navigate throughout the app. One person recommended putting the name of the person who sent a new message. The notification lacked the name Marvin Jackson.
Findings/Learnings
I realized that research and data might not always correlate to my personal findings. After researching information about engaging users, I found that people need some sort self motivation before sharing that among others.
When working on the prototypes I discovered that button placement is crucial for having better user flow. This improvement helped users navigate better and to reach where they needed to in a timely matter.
Users sounded excited to see something like this in their app store, and look forward to downloading the final product in the future.
Contact Information
Phone
(949) 892 - 0224
E-mail
Tylermj333@gmail.com
Location
Irvine, California, USA
