FITFUN

UX/UI - iOS - 2021

How we designed the new Fitfun app for fitness enthusiasts to connect with like-minded individuals and increase their motivation.

FitFun is a social platform for connecting people who love sports, fitness, and outdoor activities. A beta version was created, before CEO Clive Guan and Yifei Wang asked our team to help them develop it during a 3-week sprint. Clive - originally being a Personal Trainer, wanted us to focus on how PTs could connect with potential customers.

After an initial workshop with the client, we determined that the key objectives were to: determine the interest of users to use FitFun, determine the target market of FitFunand identify processes within the beta version of FitFun that need improvement.

ROLE

I was part of a team of 8 UX designers. My role consisted in User Research, UX Design, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing

PROJECT TIMELINE

3-week Sprint

THE PROBLEM

Australians who like to socialise and get fit by exercising outdoors with others want to connect with fitness professionals and like-minded individuals at a time and place that suits them, but don't know how to make this happen.

KEY DELIVERABLES

- Research-driven high fidelity prototype
- Determine the marketing strategy for FitFun

DISCOVER

We used a range of research methods to try and understand how to develop and improve the existing FitFun app. We only had a week to uncover the potential users' pain points and opportunities, which was complicated as it turned out a lot of insights and areas of focus came out of the research.

RESEARCH

To understand the current fitness and exercising space, we conducted a thorough destkop research on the main behaviours and issues encountered by Australians.

Key Exercising Pain Points
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Price sensitivity
Time poor
Lack of motivation
Feeling judged

Need for Exercise

- 67% of Australian adults are overweight or obese
- 1 in 5 Australians suffer from mental illness

Loneliness

- 1 in 3 Australians never or rarely feel part of a group of friends.
- COVID-19 has caused a 54% increase of loneliness in Australians.

SURVEY

The respondents of the survey gave us several key insights on which to focus the 1:1 interviews.

80%
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were unhappy with the amount of exercise they're doing

45%

said they were lacking motivation

75%

said they exercised alone, not necessarily by choice

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
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We focused on fitness-based apps as well as service providers where fitness professionals have the ability to advertise their business. It appeared that all of these applications can be accessed for free by all members but offer a subscription in order to access all features.

1:1 INTERVIEWS

We had understood what is stopping people from exercising more, so we had to deepen our understanding of these issues during the interviews, as well as understand the PTs point of view.

Personal Trainers
- Their biggest motivations include having a positive impact on peoples lives and enacting real personal change.
- Being over contacted by clients at times outside of work hours is a big frustration, especially when it is to repeat things they already discussed.

Social Fitness Participants
- It appeared that most people like exercising with others but struggled to connect with them.
- Exercising in a group setting helps with motivation, and most wouldn't exercise as much if they were by themselves.
- Time-poor participants struggle to find activities that suits their schedule and their friends' schedule.

Not the right problem?

We were initially focusing on how to connect personal trainers with fitness participants, however the research showed another angle from the the users point of view. After a client meeting, it was agreed we would focus on the identified target audience - people wanting to exercise more and connect with like-minded individuals but lacking time and/or motivation.

Our new problem statement became that Australians who want to achieve a variety of fitness goals feel as though they are more likely to succeed and enjoy themselves when they are connected with like-minded others, however struggle with the time and motivation to organise themselves and make valuable fitness connections.
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DEFINE

Personas & their journeys

Social Follower
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Crystal is very time poor and struggles to find partners or people to exercise with unless it's a pre-organised class or activity. Group activities are essential for her motivation for the social aspects, and she values referrals from her friends.

Social Organiser
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Aaron is a very organised and motivated person but struggles with the effort of communication when organising events. His main motivation is to maintain existing relationships and not necessarily to create new ones.

Social Competitor
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Justin is extremely passionate about fitness, mostly for the health benefits and the competition. He is time poor and an overthinker- he feels guilty when he doesn't do enough. He wished he could find someone to compete with who has similar interests.

DEVELOP

IDEATION

We organised an ideation workshop with 11 participants, including members of FitFun and some personas. It was gery valuable to have everyone's point of view when looking for a solution.
After presenting the 3 personas and their journeys, we asked our participants the following How Might We.

MVP

We mapped the ideas and chose to prototype those that represented greatest value and least cost. We conducted the MVP session with the clients which was very valuable. Some of the ideas that came out during the ideation session were actually in the beta version of the FitFun app, which gave us the opportunity to work around those. Some of the new features included:

Enable Crystal to easily find and attend events and join groups in her area
- Live map functionality showing activities happening right now in her area
- Intelligent matching suggestions for like-minded connections recommended events, and groups
- Make fun and enjoyable by creating social posts with enticing pictures

Enable Aaron to easily create fitness events and forms groups through even creation and a management booking system
- Group creation and management system
- Enable easy communication with participants including via external channels

Enable Justin to easily connect with like-minded fitness buddies
- Intelligent suggestions for like-minded connections

USABILITY EVALUATION

Since there was an existing beta app, it seemed essential to use it as a base before applying any change or new features. However we quickly saw it showed some issues. It seemed like doing a usability evaluation would help us understand the features we should keep in the prototype as they were and the ones we should improve or revise.The main things identified that needed improvement were the text and styling, the mobile usability and some error prevention.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

After having all the informations needed to understand how the prototype would be built, we could map the information architecture and the user flows that would be very helpful for the delivery phase.

DELIVER

WIREFRAMES

Within the UI team, we divided the sections of the prototype so we could be more efficient as we had a few days to build it. After sketching the inital wireframes and discussing it in group, we agreed on the general feel of the future app and started working on the low-fidelity prototype so we could quickly start testing it.

USER TESTING

We conducted 3 rounds of testing that helped us knowing the areas that needed improvements, or the features the users liked and dislikes. It helped us greatly in terms of getting to the last version of the prototype very quickly. We took into account everything that was said during the testing, whether it was positive and negative. We then applied the changes requested.

FITFUN
‍
We created a fully clickable prototype that answered Crystal, Aaron and Justin’s pain points.

KEY FEATURES

Joining Events

Crystal and Justin are too time poor to organise activities. They can now browse events happening around them, or recommended to them depending on their interests and the ones their friends are attending.

Social Connections
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Crystal, Aaron and Justin are lacking social connections. They are able to add new connection, and are recommended groups and people that share their interests (that they previously add to their profile).

Event Creation

Aaron struggles when it comes to creating an event as he needs all the information to be in one place so participants can refer to it. He can now do this in the event section, where he can create events and invite participants.

Live Map

All the events are accessible through an interactive map so Crystal, Justin and Aaron can quickly see what is happening around them and join an event in one click.

Profile

All users have a profile which provides them with a means to find and connect with a compatible fitness match.

NEXT STEPS

While a lot of work was done on this projects, there are still things that need to be looked into or improved. We have provided our client with a proposed roadmap to help them know what direction to explore next.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This project taught me a lot, on a professional and personal level. It was great to work with such other UX designers as it allowed to gain a lot of insights on the defined problem very quickly. It was also very challenging to have such a broad brief, as time wasn’t on our side and we had to reach out to the client from the start to make sure everyone agreed on the problem we should focus on.