A digital solution that helps busy people fit personalized workout plans into their daily routine.
Context
Despite desires to stay healthy and exercise, finding time in today’s busy lifestyle is a struggle. Putting together workout plans takes time & energy, and motivation quickly fades due to busy lifestyle and prioritization of other matters. I set out to resolve these pain points by creating a mobile-first website.
People struggled to keep up with exercise due to busy lifestyle and lack of motivation.
To learn about how people stay healthy, I conducted 8 user interviews over Zoom.
All 8 users agreed that exercise is crucial for maintaining good health but struggled to fit consistent workout routines.
What interviewees spoke about exercise →
Organized interview content into categories like below (affinity map) ↴
Major pain points I heard from users:
Planning for exercise takes effort.
Choosing how to exercise – finding the right routines that align with user's health goals & preferences takes time & energy.
Staying motivated is hard.
Staying consistent to workout routine is challenging due to work, life events, and low motivation.
Key insights – users shared what helped them to stay motivated:
01
Exercise routines that align with user goals & needs.
Alignment between exercise type and user goal & needs encouraged engagement.
02
Visually seeing the progress throughout the week/month.
Tracking progress helped users assess their activity level, making adjustment easier.
03
Accountability & social interaction helps.
Keeping each other accountable motivated users to continue with exercise goals.
Competitive research
The market lacks a personalized approach to exercise routines despite offering a wide range of resources.
To familiarize myself with the market, I conducted competitive analysis of 5 exercise platforms. Focused on 3 aspects (as discussed in the above key insights):
how onboarding leads to personalized exercise experience
how progress is visually communicated
how accountability/social aspect is incorporated
User persona
The target audience is health conscious yet busy people who is motivated to fit exercise into their daily routines.
Meet Chris & June who want to fit more exercise into their lifestyle.
Storyboarding
Illustrated major pain point and how Fitlabs set out to resolve this problem →
Envisioning user journey through storyboarding.
Defining the problem
Problem
Despite desires to stay healthy, finding time to exercise is a struggle:
Putting together workout plans takes time and energy.
Motivation quickly fades due to busy lifestyle and prioritization of other matters.
Solution
Fitlabs is a mobile-first responsive website that makes it easier to fit exercise into daily routine:
Detailed onboarding questions on user goals and preferences.
Homepage with a set of personalized workouts based on user needs.
Ideation
Sketched various ideas, keeping in mind the major pain points & key insights gathered from user research.
Feature prioritization
Used feature matrix to prioritize features that are critical for onboarding process and for personalizing exercise routines →
Prioritizing features for personalizing exercise routines.
Information architecture
Giving users flexibility & control during onboarding process and when engaging with their workout videos.
User flows on onboarding process & beginning today's workout ↴
Mid-fidelity Wireframes
Refining details on content & copywriting through designing mid-fi wireframes.
Landing page & onboarding screens ↴
Personalized homepage & exercise tab screens ↴
Visual design
Evoking excitement & encouraging active engagement through visual design.
Chose vibrant red for primary color to communicate strength & excitement. Incorporated images that accurately depicts exercise movements to encourage active engagement with the product.
Usability testing
Improving visual display of showing the exercise progress & clarifying the language for easier scannability.
Conducted 6 moderated usability testings. All 6 users successfully completed the onboarding, arrived at their personalized homepage, and started & completed ‘today’s workout’.
Iterations were made to improve interface elements for clear communication.
Landing page that clearly explains the features Fitlabs offers.
Access to Fitlabs’ wide range of exercise categories and expert instructors is possible when you sign up!
Detailed onboarding that translates to a personalized experience.
Answer a few questions on your goals and needs, we will auto generate a set of workout routines and guide you in each step to achieving your goals.
Workout progress that is tracked & displayed to keep you motivated.
See which days you stayed active. Resuming workout videos where you left off is easy with Fitlabs.
Further thoughts
Challenges I faced
Thinking through the details on how the product uses data collected from onboarding to suggest workout routines was challenging.
My thought process for the algorithm was: each workout video will have each own set of descriptive tags which will match with the unique combination of answers from the onboarding questionnaire. Insight and direction from engineering is needed in thinking through the details.
Next steps
If this were a real life project, I would work with engineering from the very beginning to get their input on the feasibility of the design.
Possible feature add: incorporating AI technology to check exercise postures will not only encourage user engagement but also prevent potential injuries.