Designing a fitness app — a UX case study

It’s normal for our bodies to go through various transformations throughout our lives. Some of these we might be responsible for, while some may completely be out of our control. For example, you can’t just wake up one day and decide you’re going to stop ageing because you’re going through a quarter life crisis (I’m not talking about myself). Anyway, for many of us, it’s about being in as much control of your own body as you can, and fitness is one of those aspects that can be controlled to a great extent, at least if you do not have any medical conditions that might pose health risks.

Having said that, I decided to use this as an opportunity to test my design skills and channel my creativity into working on a solution for people who want to exercise, but who — for various reasons — don’t get around to it.

The Challenge: How to get people to stay motivated and maintain a healthy exercise routine.

The Solution: This study is primarily meant to provide insight into why people want to exercise and what keeps them motivated (or not) to continue doing it. Based on these insights and after going through the entire design process (which I will get to shortly), I came up with an initial design for a smartphone application.

The Process: We already know that design processes don’t generally follow a linear path, however, for the sake of maintaining some structure, I’ll be breaking the process down into the following steps: Research, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Evaluate.

Objective

1. Empathise with the user and gain useful insights into their lives
2. Come up with solutions backed by research
3. Improve my solutions based on user feedback
4. Communicate my design process

Since this is a personal project and not an actual design project with real stakes involved, the solutions I provide are not exhaustive and are entirely based on the insights I gained from user research.

Research

I already briefly talked about my target audience: people who want to exercise, but — for various reasons — don’t get around to it. To begin understanding more about why this happens, I identified a few goals:

1. Why the user wants to exercise?
2. What happens, or how they feel, when they don’t exercise?
3. What happens, or how they feel, when they do exercise?

With these goals in mind, I decided to use two different research methods:

1. User interviews
2. Context mapping

Before I began preparing my research tools, I managed to recruit 3 people aged between 24–30.

The interview itself was supposed to be semi-structured, so it was more of a conversation which could change direction based on what I wanted to get from the user. And what I wanted to get from the user was information mainly around the three goals I had identified earlier, so my questions ranged from general ones, e.g. “Why do you want to exercise?” to specific ones, e.g. “Can you describe how you felt the last time you exercised?”

The reason why I decided to take the research a step further with context mapping was because with techniques such as interviews, you only know what the user tells you, i.e. you’re touching the surface. On the other hand, context mapping allows you to extract deeper insights by understanding the user in their context — a way for them to show you their world.

I gave the user a few activities to perform over a period of one week. They were simple activities, such as noting down their daily routine, taking pictures of (or drawing) their ideal exercise environment, and taking pictures of (or drawing) things that helped or prevented them from exercising.

Here is a summary what I found out:

1. There is no balance between work and personal life, which leaves less room for hobbies and other activities
2. Not having a proper exercise environment and equipment, such as an open-air space or a gym, is a problem
3. Fear of injury because the user isn’t confident in their technique and how much their body can achieve while exercising
4. Demotivated by not knowing what food to eat to maximize the benefits of the effort they are putting into exercising
5. The feeling of guilt when they’re not able to exercise, leading to a pattern which enforces this habit
6. The users had already tried a few fitness apps, however they felt that the apps did not provide proper instructions for beginners and used flattering images which lead to unrealistic body goals

My drawing skills are terrible

Personas that I came up with to represent my users

Problem Definition

So, what did I do with all this data I gathered? To organize and make sense of it, I took inspiration from Affinity Diagramming and started looking for major themes in my findings.

I began with writing every insight from my research down on a post-it note, and then grouping them into clusters based on similar themes. This helped me organize and rank the themes according to what was most relevant to the project. I was able to identify to identify four major themes:

1. Motivation
2. Timing
3. Location
4. Organization

Insights broken down into major themes

I used an Empathy Map to divide the research data based on what the user said, did, thought, and felt. I already knew what the user said and what they did from the interview sessions. However, figuring out what the user thought and felt was more tricky, as I had to rely on interpretation of what they said, their choice of words, body language, and other cues. This entire exercise allowed me to synthesize needs (activities the user might do or desires they might have) and insights (looking for contradictions in user attributes and asking why this discrepancy exists) to define a more clearer design challenge.

Empathy Map

Needs

1. A good balance between my work and personal life so that I’m able to find time for exercise
2. Consistency in my exercise routine and eating habits
3. More information and guidance on what to eat to promote a healthier lifestyle
4. A personal guide/trainer to help a beginner like me

Insights

1. The user confirmed that having no proper guidance has led to injury in the past
2. Being impatient in achieving desired results has led to demotivation
3. They made an effort to spend time and money on a healthier diet but could not sustain it
4. They have developed unhealthy eating habits due to their hectic and stressful work routine
5. Sitting idly at their work desk for a large part of the day has made them lazy
6. Wanting to look physically fit but not willing to do the effort
7. Why do they want others to think they look nice? Is that their goal behind physical fitness?
8. Maybe having a fitness coach could make their exercise experience more personalized?

Now that I had a clearer definition of the users’ needs, I created Point of Views (POVs) to specify which needs were most important to fulfill. First I defined the user, then I picked a need from my list and identified the insight which the need was based on. For example:

User: An office worker who works 9–8 every day 5 days a week. Is single. Has no kids. Supports their parents.

Need: To find time to do light exercises in their day, during or after their work hours.

Insight: The user mostly sits at a desk at work, and commutes on a motorbike. Has gained weight because of little mobility and unhealthy eating habits. Needs to incorporate some physical activity in their routine to improve health.

This allowed me to create a POV madlib, which is basically inserting our POV information into a template: [User] needs [Need] because [Insight]

1. An office worker needs to balance their work and personal life to find the time to exercise during their workday because they want to avoid being lazy and generally improve their health.
2. A young professional needs guidance on their general health and exercising habits because they want to find the motivation to consistently exercise and eat healthier.
3. A college student needs a personal guide to help them exercise properly because they want to see better results and avoid injuries.

There! Creating POV madlibs provided me with clear descriptions which I could now turn into actionable prompts by converting them into How Might We? questions (HMV). The goal here was to come up with as many questions as I could from each madlib, broad enough to generate multiple solutions but still narrow for me to answer:

1. How Might We come up with short and simple exercises to fit into a workday?
2. How Might We make time in a 9–5 worker’s day for physical activity?
3. How Might We get office management to encourage physical activity?
4. How Might We inspire office workers towards a healthier lifestyle?
5. How Might We guide beginners to properly exercise?
6. How Might We exercises more informative and fun?
7. How Might We create a more personal and tailored experience for people?
8. How Might We appeal physical activity to beginners?
9. How Might We provide guidance on healthy eating for better results?
10. How Might We help people to be self-motivated to workout?

Ideation

This image is here to remind you what a bad idea looks like

To make this session fun, I started with a question: could deliberately generating terrible ideas become a source of inspiration? In short, yes. It’s called coming up the Worst Possible Ideas and it’s as fun as it sounds. This is how it went:

• After taking a quick peek at my HWM questions, I set a timer for 10 minutes and wrote down as many worst possible ideas I could come up with
• Afterwards, I analyzed these ideas and thought about why they’re so bad
• Finally, I forced myself to think of the aspects of the bad ideas and how they can be turned into a good idea

Some really bad ideas I came up with:

• Have office management remove lunch breaks to push workers to exercise
• Recommend the hardest possible exercise to beginner users
• Give the user no instructions and leave them alone to figure out how the exercises work
• Keep annoying users with exercise reminder notifications
• After sending an exercise reminder notification, show the user pictures of appealing and unhealthy food items

And how I used these as inspiration to come up with good ideas:

• Make it competitive by allowing users to challenge each other and maintaining a leaderboard of points (office management could offer incentives to workers?)
• An introductory tutorial, where the user is shown how the app works and what to get familiar with
• Using simple information (like height, weight, current physical activity level) as input from the user to give them an idea of where they currently stand. Based on this, recommend them exercise progressions and paths
• After sending an exercise reminder notification, show the user tips on how to warm up and what to eat before the exercise
• Between exercises, show an animation of the movement, the target muscles, and a text description of how to perform it (voice for accessibility)
• Start with the easiest exercise and show the path to the hardest progression (the user can skip if they’re not beginners)

Prototyping and Evaluation

Before I began working on actual prototypes, I drew storyboards to flesh out the user flow of the app. This involved the user journey, how they discover the app, the first time they use it, and their eventual use pattern. This not only explained what the user was doing but also why they did it and how they felt about it.

My terrible drawing skills, yet again

Storyboard 1

Storyboard 2 (my persona somehow lost his hair)

Next, I picked up a pencil and a lot of paper and started sketching paper prototypes incorporating the solutions I discussed my the Ideation session

How the app starts

Home and Exercise categories

During the exercise

Leaderboard and Friends

To evaluate my design, I decided to go back to the users I had recruited during the research phase. Due to the limited number of participants, I could not go into much depth with evaluation, however, I was still able to run a quick and dirty test of my design. I came up with a few tasks for the user to perform, such as:

1. Sign up for the app and set your fitness goal to maintain your current weight
2. Try to start the recommended exercise give by the app
3. Try to start a beginner level workout focusing on thighs
4. Check if you have challenges from any friends and view the leaderboard

Throughout the session, I encouraged the users to think out loud as I took their feedback in the form of a Feedback Capture Grid. This allowed to categorize feedback into what the user liked, what they didn’t like, questions, and ideas.

Feedback Capture Grid

Using the feedback grid let me highlight different areas of improvement, especially in the Criticism and Ideas quadrants. It did not come to me as a surprise that many of my assumptions turned out to be wrong.

For instance:

1. Users felt that reminders do not motivate them to exercise
2. They felt annoyed receiving tips every time before they began an exercise
3. How will the app know what kind of pre-workout and post-workout meal to recommend?
4. Will harder exercises give more points?

Reflection

As I briefly mentioned before, this study was constrained mainly due to having a limited number of participants. My objective was to empathize with people and gain useful insights into their lives, and I was able to successfully do that by getting my hands dirty with applying different design thinking methods.

My next step would be to take the feedback from the evaluation session and use it as inspiration to iterate through the previous phases of the process. I would also like to polish my visual design skills and convert some of these insights into pleasant infographics (there’s a lot of text here), and also work on creating high-fidelity mockups for the paper prototypes.