Exo fitness app | An app UX design Case Study
Project overview
Exo is a fitness app with a goal to engage more lads who are working people from morning to evening and barely get time to do some workout due to extensive work pressure and busy with social life. This app will encourage them to keep their body fit and lead a healthy life through using it.
Goal
My goal for this project:
- Find out Why young people want to do exercise?
- Figure out What concretely happens when they manage to do exercise.
- What concretely happens when they don’t manage to do exercise.
- Offer solutions to users that improve their health and life.
- Product timeline, strategy, and learning.
Through Using the Solution and app, I can have young people involved in physical exercise and if they don’t get around it I had to come with solutions to encourage their involvement. Using the app user can easily do some exercise to keep themself fit on regular basis and build a habit. Besides, the app will also generate a little amount of profit filling the business objectives.
obstacle faced
- User’s self-interest in joining in an interview.
- Not getting scheduled to interview From expected sample or audience.
- Finding out the best solution to make them habituated with fitness work.
- Had to check all the competitor’s apps by myself for competitive analysis.
Role
I worked as an individual player on this case study project so had to take major decisions and performed all activities by myself.
My Approach to Solve this problem
Moved with Design thinking which is a holistic and non-linear approach as we know. It’s a continuous and iterative process by which we can improve each step by finding out the needs of users. The design thinking approach helped me to understand users, define the problem, brainstorm the possible idea and later prototype the idea and test it with users to find out their pain points and solve it, launch it in the market & make it more useful to them.
Research & insights
In the first stage of design thinking, I tried to talk to the young lads for what is their thinking, feeling, attitudes, needs, and wants, and tried to understand their emotions. Hold an interview and survey them to learn more about them and their behavior & feeling.
saturate space and group was the best idea to gather all insight in one place, i used them whenever i needed to and take look every time i step on new process to find answers of the problem. probably this is my favorite among all activities & techniques.
Needs
- Want to Prevent chronic diseases.
- Improve health conditions and immune system.
- Track fitness activities.
- Group exercise.
- Favorite music playlist with activities.
- Set a fixed schedule to do exercise within a limited time.
- Personalized Exercise.
Pain points
- lack of confidence.
- Imbalance work-life activities and less prioritizing.
- No knowledge of any kind of fitness activities and how to do them properly.
- No Reminder or scheduling.
Adding a Persona to portray a single user who stands for all to understand them better as one instead of using multiple persona.
Problem Statement
The problem statement, also known as point of view, which I came across from the insights from user research, User persona, and Empathy mapping. To find out the solution, I synthesized the data and information I collected to define the statement. For Problem statement i used template like [User] [Need] & [Insights]
My offering solutions
(Design thinking is a non-linear process so it will be continuously developed by experimenting, Researching and iterate each stage to find out the best possible solution)
Users will experience the service by using a mobile app. I need to make sure that my designed digital experience is friendly, usable, desirable, credible, and accessible. Few Offering solutions based on user behavior, attitude, lifestyle, and insights from the research I’ve offered on this project are:
- Personalization fitness work.
- Track fitness.
- A community for more encouragement.
- Challenges for habituating routine.
- Leader board to compete with each other in points.
Let me have you go through the strategic way to solve the problem.
later we jump into the HMW (how might we). the plan is to generate as many as questions to validate and find out insights. This will be broader in number and idea but have to be narrow for answers.
Few How Might we question I brainstormed during the process:
1. How might we make them work on a regular basis
2. How might we help users schedule exercise?
3. How might we cooperate with them on an exercise plan?
4. How might we help them keep tracking fitness and health?
5. How might we help them to create a dietary chart for strength?
6. How might we connect them with the community?
7. How might we guide them in a proper way to fitness and exercise?
8. How might we make them more consistent in fitness?
9. How might we Offer them a personalized training program?
10. How might we Make it more competitive for users to encourage them to do more workouts?
Ideation
This stage gives you the freedom to think, talk, and discuss anything that comes across your mind regarding the problem. it’s is said that even a bad idea can lead to the best idea and solution.
In the Ideation stage I used two methods to validate and find the answer:
1. Worst possible idea.
2. Challenge Assumptions.
I’m the only player for it that’s why I’d chosen the worst possible idea. it’s fun generating ideas that going to support a better idea around it. Based on these I’d come up with a few worst possible ideas:
- Recommend the toughest workout challenge.
- Urge them to do workouts, fail to do that, they will lose the account.
- Make them connected with foodie people who want to leave
junk food and start a fitness program.
Now it’s time to List the assumptions about the users
The listing assumption is another amazing method to find out answers by brainstorming and setting a specific timeframe like 5–10 minutes. Let’s see some Assumptions:
- They say enough to tell about early leave for exercise.
- Unable to balance work and life due to multiple schedules.
- Buy materials for fitness activities.
How about challenging them?
A few of the challenge assumptions are following the assumption list:
- What if They feel confident enough to ask permission?
- What if they listen to music and discussion various topics during the workout
- What if manage a place to work out with a good environment?
After these steps still, I found some ideas by challenging the assumptions and turning them into ideas like:
- They will set a fixed schedule to do exercise within a limited time
- Challenge friends to join and beat them.
- Group exercise with a leaderboard for competition.
Information architecture
Before jumping into the sketch, I first need to find out the flow and process in which way the user will go through and interested, that means creating a roadmap to achieve the task successfully.
Sketch
I gather info from research and put it together in a paper to make sure it’s going to provide users with the necessary content. It’s the most powerful to generate multiple ideas and solutions with a quick time turnaround. though it’s not final, it’s going to support further high-fi mockups in the later stage.
Low-fi wireframe
Lo-fi wireframe to synthesize all the collected data previously and put them together using black and light gray color and text to determine contents for the Final product design.
Final Design & Tasks for users to achieve
This is the visual design stage with a product style guide and design system for the end product. By using and gathering all of these, I eventually analyze and split tasks and flows for users to achieve their desired goals. For instance: create a personalized fitness program.
Sneak peak of Style guide and components (partial) i used across the final product(MVP).
For Designing a product, a designer must familiar and master with components and style guide. In market it should be easily recognizable at first glance through it branding and style guide across the product. using Component will save you a lot of time and tons of my if you plan to scale business at large scale in near future.
Onboard for user
In this stage, users will choose their intention, provide info about their body measurement and customize the notification on how they will be remembered to achieve daily goals.
Home, Fitness lesson & Personalization lesson
On the home page, users can see what’s their reminder for upcoming polling events. later what they want to work out on. A sneak peeks of their goals, minutes spent, and burnt calories. After that, they will see some workout lessons provided by special mentors. Users can also able to create personalized workout lessons.
Challenges & Community polling
Gamified this task by providing Daily challenges to meet on a daily basis which will allure users and engage them to achieve and make on the top list of the leader board. Also a polling system inside the community for a group workout.
Leader board and challenge friends
This leader board was designed for gamification. It urges them to be on top by challenging each other and meeting challenges and goals.
Dashboard
Users easily access the dashboard and see data based on weekly, monthly, and yearly & overall data of progress along with other insights relating to fitness.
Launch MVP as soon as possible!!!
I’ve just made a strategy and timeline to achieve what I’d assumed to reach it and launch MVP in the market. it’s necessary that one should launch ideas in the market as MVP to collect leads and feedback and based on that you come up with a better version.
Business objectives
A successful product is not only user-centered but also business-centered as well. In the market to dominate competitors I had to meet both users as well as business needs and objectives. It’s a B2C Category business, it will generally want to earn a profit, and pitch to investors for further development with new features. Few business objectives behind this app:
- Add payment as low as $1/exercise lesson to earn profit.
- Challenge fnf and encourage them to sign up on the platform.
- More engagement of users by gamification.
- After bootstrapping, it will try to pitch investors for further development of features.
Conclusion
Scope of work
- More usability post-launching tests to collect feedback and come up with the latest solutions.
- Features like Nutrition, an in-home coach, and a place to work out.
- Post-work-out food
- Rewards for achieving points and redeeming them for vegetables and healthy foods and fitness equipment as well.
- Scale the product in a near future at a large size in the market.
Reflection and learning
This is a personal project, but I tried to add as much data and insight as possible. again, my goal was to find out why a user wants to do a workout and what happens when they manage to do the workout. I was able to deep dive into the different techniques to find out and provide a solution for both users and business. I thoroughly studied, researched, interact, direct,ed and body copies all written by me.
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