Personal Growth

Promote the close connection between feeling good and being fit as a part of one’s identity.

Connected

This experience will facilitate new and existing relationships and build community amongst users and experts to promote accountability and motivation.

Trustworthy & Informed

Through the trustworthy advice of experts, users will be encouraged to maintain better health & fitness routines for the rest of their lives.

Curated & Organized

Providing personalized fitness routines and workout plans that work with user’s lifestyles. Efficiently keeps information and fitness options organized in one place.

Accessible

Maintain a platform that is easy and varied; providing users to explore new fitness activities and routines for a variety of equipment, timeframes, and environments.

From these findings, we identified key design principles that we as a team should adhere to when designing our product:

Design Principles

comeUnity

OVERVIEW

comeUnity is a mobile application designed to provide a community for millennials seeking for motivation to uphold a healthy lifestyle through human connection and exciting challenges.

This was created as part of a temporary project, with the objective to create a health application that overcomes the need for a sense of community during a pandemic.

ROLE

UX/UI Designer

Product Strategy, User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing

10 – 24 July 2020

Background

Challenge

Problem

How might we provide a platform that engages active millennials that are interested in specialized health and fitness experiences?

Context

When the pandemic hit the entire world, gyms and fitness centers all around us shut their doors in response. While many of us struggled to maintain our regular fitness regimes, a number of us turn to our phones or laptops. The pandemic has increased the addressable market for virtual fitness offerings and also forced traditional gyms to move into offering more virtual products for at-home workouts.

01

Millennials often rely on others as a source of accountability and motivation.

02

Users value variety in fitness activities and seek to try out new/different experiences.

03

Millennials like instruction and advice from reliable sources and fitness experts.

Understanding the Problem

After conducting interviews with multiple users to discover what drives them toward maintaining a regular fitness routine, we found that:

An emphasis on “Friends and Community” was the largest aspect of fitness that motivated users most

Users mostly turn to social media to build and/or find a fitness community and to seek expert advice

Most respondents use Instagram and/or YouTube for fitness-related purposes (namely “inspiration,” “motivation,” “community building” and “advice”); thus, we strongly recommend that the platform have a strong visual emphasis (videos and photos).

After analyzing our survey results, we have concluded that:

Deep-dive into Users' Minds

Design Mockups

Feature 01.

Allow users to view weekly statistics of others, join group challenges and schedule workout classes with friends, enabling the cultivation of a supportive community.

Feature 02.

Help users discover various fitness activities and expert-led classes to keep workouts interesting under professional guidance.

Feature 03.

Enable live video class sessions with friends to connect virtually, motivate and hold each other accountable.

Homepage

From the homepage, users have immediate access to workout sets or featured challenges that are catered to them. They can also view their weekly progress to feel accomplished and motivated or to keep themselves accounted for.

Community

Users can easily see recent activities of their friends and view their profiles with a simple click. The (+) button in the middle can be noticed quickly, as it is the main function for the purpose of this app, to build a community.

Friend Profile

To encourage more interaction between users, they can view and join the different challenges and workouts their friends are enrolled in. For privacy purposes, users can decide if they want their progress to be private or public.

FINAL
DESIGNS

Planner

The planner serves as a reminder, as well as gives the user a detailed overview of upcoming schedules; while the calendar is more used to show users their availabilities.

Event Page

On any event page, users can see which of their friends are also attending, encouraging them to join. Since the social aspect of comeUnity is highly emphasized, users can also easily share with and invite friends to attend.

Planner Confirmation

From our user insights, we learned that feedback is very important when it comes to confirming schedules.

Weekly Challenges

Users have a myriad of weekly challenges to pick from, as well as a filter to cater to their current preferences and needs.

Workout Overview

From the main workout starting page, users have the choice to enable their cameras for a more immersive experience.

Workout Session

Users have mentioned that having a progress bar during a workout keeps them motivated, as they are more aware of how long they have left, and make workouts seem less strenuous.

Concept 1

Allow users to video chat their friends while doing the same workout, whether live or previously recorded
- Workout while sharing video/audio; lock the room or allow others to jump into the workout

Concept 2

Gives users the tools they need to design and submit their own workouts to their friends and communities in a customizable way

Concept 3

Allow users to view weekly statistics of other users, participate in various group challenges and join scheduled workout classes with friends, thereby driving them to maintain a consistent fitness journey

Concept Ideation

Analyzing Our Competitors

Zoom

Can provide more personalized and community driven fitness experiences; the idea of being led by an expert in a class setting

Sweat

Has expert facilitation integrated into the service
Tracking goals and progress
Curated experiences

Instagram

Ability to reach out to fitness experts according to one's own preferences
Highly emphasized on visuals – video based
Build network and camaraderie among fitness community

CentrFit

Coached workout experiences (can toggle self-guided or coached)
Share fitness journey on blog
Focused on both diet and exercise

Key Insights

Guidance & Advice – There is a need to integrate direction and advice into a health plan - either in the form of teachers and coaches sought out on one's own or having expert facilitation integrated into the service.
Social Aspect – Also, there is a social element to most of our competitors - and this is backed by our user research as something that people often seek.
Tracking & Progress – Tracking and goals setting fulfill the need for motivation and self determination on the part of users. Several of the users we interviewed mentioned this and our competitive analysis helped us to solidify it.

Looking back

What I learned

I learned how to utilize user feedback to make the best decision for our application, even when it comes to removing important features related to the needs that our users initially wished for.

If I had more time

I would conduct more research on how users prefer the realtime video calling during a workout, as it is a relatively new space to explore.

What could be improved

As not everyone wants their workout history or progress to be shown completely, there should be a privacy setting where users can decide what should appear on their profile and what shouldn't.