This project focuses on designing features in the Fitbit app to motivate users, particularly those who struggle to maintain healthy habits, to adopt and sustain behaviors that promote holistic health. The goal is to address the challenge of behavior change by enhancing user engagement and retention through thoughtful design.
Project Brief
Timeframe: 4 weeks
Team: Juhi Khare, Shrey Maheshwari, Wan-Tang Hsu
My Role: UX Designer
Methods: Interviews, Personas, Storyboarding, Usability Testing
Primary Research
We interviewed 8 participants aged 20-30 to explore their exercise habits, motivations, and use of technology in maintaining physical fitness, using affinity mapping to refine our findings.
Secondary Research
We conducted a literature review, analyzing papers from journals like Elsevier and Journal of Sports Science & Medicine, to validate our primary findings on exercise anxiety. These sources provided qualitative data that supported our focus on the topic.
Takeaways
This led us to identify anxiety about working out in public spaces, like gyms, as a key barrier to physical activity and focus on designing solutions to address it within the Fitbit app.
How might we redesign the Fitbit mobile application to reduce anxiety of working out in a public space?
Target User Group
To guide our design, we developed personas reflecting key user needs.
Social Exerciser: Values physical fitness and finds motivation through exercising with others or sharing progress with friends and family.
Socially Anxious User: Struggles with exercising in public due to self-consciousness but remains dedicated to maintaining fitness.
Ideation
Using our personas, we brainstormed concepts tailored to address the specific challenges of exercising in public spaces. These ideas, aimed at enhancing comfort and confidence, were visualized through storyboards to effectively communicate our design solutions.
Workout buddy feature: User’s can connect with people with similars goals, interests and personalities to work out together.
Occupancy feature: This feature enables user’s to check the busyness of gyms and public workout places and decide a suitable place and time for them.
User Flow
We developed a user flow for the updated version of the application to map out the step-by-step interactions and touch points for users, ensuring a seamless experience aligned with our design goals.
User Testing and Iterations
Testing our low-fidelity wireframes with 3 users provided valuable feedback on the three main flows of our redesign, leading to iterations that resulted in high-fidelity prototypes. The initial System Usability Scale score of 58, indicating usability in the 'OK' to 'Good' range, prompted further design refinements to enhance the user experience.
Fitness Tribe
Finding a fitness tribe not only helps user’s feel included in a community of people with similar goals and issues, it also gives them a safe space to share their feelings.
Workout Buddy
User’s can connect with people with similars goals, interests and personalities to work out together.
Buddy Session
Using Bluetooth to motivate people to connect physically, providing a more engaging exercise experience. Incorporating features that allow users to exercise with workout buddy, including friendly competitions and status sharing
Occupancy
This feature enables user’s to check the busyness of gyms and public workout places and decide a suitable place and time for them.
Future Scope
Include interactive elements to establish a better bond between buddies before meeting for a workout and during their session.
Create a mechanism for healthy competition amongst tribe members in order to encourage peers.
Establish a tie-up with trainers and consultants to provide guidance for people with exercise anxiety.
Provide guided sessions based on the fitness goals of users. They can use it for sessions with their buddy as well.