Role : UX / UI Designer, UX Researcher

Initial Problem

How might we integrate a messaging feature in order to boost user engagement and maintain retention?

I conducted COMPETITIVE RESEARCH to see how others were incorporating messaging…(SPOILER, they weren’t).

After conducting competitive research on a number of existing fitness apps, none had their own messaging feature - (to clarify, while Apple Fitness and Fitbit have the ability to receive & send messages, it is in conjunction with text messages, and not exclusive to their platform).

Due to the non-existence of messaging in fitness apps, I needed to strategize on how best to incorporate this feature into Correr’s app.  I drew inspiration from social media apps such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram, taking note of how they implemented the ability to communicate easily and seamlessly into their platform.

Secondary Research

Moving onto secondary research, I wanted to focus on the social aspect. Since Correr thinks adding a messaging feature will help engage users, it leads me to assume users are missing the ability to socialize and connect through their app.

According to CDC.gov, a workout partner will make you “feel more motivated”, as well as “be more consistent”.  An article on Ornish.com mentions, “Community builds the self-esteem that fuels dedication”. Socialization and fitness seem to go hand in hand, it’s emotionally beneficial to the user and leads to more consistent workouts.

While I have found research that proves working out with others is helpful, it leads to my next question…

Is it important for users to be connected through their fitness app in order to create more engagement?

User Interviews with pre-screened fitness individuals

To help answer my question, I virtually interviewed 5 pre-screened individuals to gain insights. I also wanted to understand:

• What are the main goals when using fitness apps?

• What motivates our user to keep using a fitness app?

• What are the reasons the user would stop using a fitness app?

• Is it important to the user to be connected to others via the fitness app? (Would this create more engagement?)

• If it’s important to connect, would the user value a messaging feature?

  …only 1 out of 5 interviewees confirmed they’d want a messaging feature in their fitness app. 

Interview Key Findings

 What did I learn?

Coming out of the interviews, I learned users are not motivated by the messaging aspect Correr believes is missing from their app. Users stay for personal fitness goals and are extremely motivated by statistics, accomplishments and improvements.  I’ve also discovered users are intrinsically drawn to fitness communities to help them pursue their objectives. Therefore, I updated my problem.

Updated Problem

How might we increase user engagement and retention based on the user’s motivation for data and community?

My Hypothesis

I believe offering detailed statistics and metrics accompanied by a strong fitness community will amplify user engagement and retention.

Synthesizing my user interviews, I built an Affinity Map in order to find the big ideas and connecting factors.

The most common sentiments include “tracking progress” and “important to connect”. These themes confirm the validity of my hypothesis. It is also worthwhile to note that despite messaging not being the main driver for user engagement and retention, it may have some merit because it ties closely to “Important to connect”.

In order to better design for Correr, I wanted to visualize who their ideal user would be.

After synthesizing the interview key findings and big sentiments from the Affinity Map, 2 personas emerged; Mark the primary user, and Joe, the secondary user.

I virtually tested my High Fidelity Prototype with 5 fitness app users and found the following user issues:

• When looking for their previous runs, users were clicking on the run icon instead of their profile.

• The label of Community is confusing, they were expecting to find other users / friends / people.

• Users wanted to see more details of their friend’s activities. Example: how long ago did they complete their run?

I iterated on my High Fidelity Screens taking into account user callouts and unsuccessful tasks.

• Users were still somewhat confused on the run icon, sometimes thinking their run history was here, however, I don’t see this being a big user issue.

• Changing the label from Community to Events proved to be much more successful.

• The updated information on friend’s posts was sufficient, I didn’t have any additional callouts on this section.

 Conclusion

Based on the research and testing, I would recommend Correr focus on offering users performance statistics and metrics to gauge and measure their progress, as well as a strong events/community section, to solve its’ user engagement and retention problem.  Both features would increase interactivity on the app, as users will be able to dive deeper into their fitness data and spend more time communicating with their connections.

Taking into consideration that Correr wanted to implement a messaging feature, I included this as part of the prototype.  While I don’t believe this would be the primary method to better engage and retain users, it is a valuable route to explore.  As shown through the research, community and connection is important to users, and messaging is a direct extension.  Testing results for messaging also yielded promising feedback.

Click here for the final prototype.

Next Steps…

If budget and timing allowed, I’d be highly interested in implementing the messaging feature and conducting further testing to see if it takes off with users. While early research proved messaging was not the solution to Correr’s engagement problem, usability testing showed it could be a viable addition to the app. My biggest takeaway from this project was that despite users saying one thing, their actions said something else.