Creating engagement and user retention for fitness communities.
Fitness
2024
1 x Product Designer
1 x Project Manager
Product Design
User Interface
WeGlow is an established women’s fitness app with a large and active community, comprised almost entirely of women. The app focuses on workouts, nutrition, community and education.
Working at Tappable, I was tasked with ideating and creating new features for the app, specifically focused on the “My Journey” section. This is an area of the app that was greatly underdeveloped and WeGlow needed a fresh approach and new ideas to reward and incentivise their loyal community.
The app is already packed full of features, from a great choice of workouts to recipes, workout planning and fitness education. However, WeGlow wanted the new section “My Journey” to be truly special for the community, so together, we came up with a new set of engaging features:
Weekly streaks to keep users motivated
Progress section focused on goals, progress photos, awards and stats
Ability to add, delete, update and share progress photos
Activity tab with the latest stats on workouts
Ability to earn awards and medals
Weekly, monthly and yearly user statistical highlights
Ability to view history of workouts, personal bests, preferred workouts, minutes worked out, etc.
Ability to claim in-app rewards
Weekly streaks to keep users motivated
Progress section focused on goals, progress photos, awards and stats
Ability to add, delete, update and share progress photos
Activity tab with the latest stats on workouts
Ability to earn awards and medals
Weekly, monthly and yearly user statistical highlights
Ability to view workouts, PBs, favourite workouts, exercise minutes, etc.
Ability to claim in-app rewards
WeGlow needed to rethink and develop its “My Journey” section of the app, which compared to all other areas, was the most underwhelming. We quickly identified this as an area of opportunity for user engagement and increased retention for user resurrection (when users come back to the app after a long pause).
After a few workshops with the client, we created a vast list of features to work on that would fit nicely into the new section, from stats to creating and editing progress photo collages, to medals, awards, personal bests and reward points.
However, as admirable as this list was, there was only so much we could fit in and realistically put through production.
We also suggested adding new colours to the app branding, besides orange and grey, to help the new sections of the app feel special and shine through.
#1
Holistic approach to the “My Journey” section.
#2
Designing a complex set of features for just one area of the app.
#3
Creating and adding a new colour scheme to the app.
#4
Creating a variety of medals and awards for various achievements and challenges.
Together with the client, we worked on putting together a list of requirements and features to map out all the areas of the new “My Journey” section.
In doing so, I looked at other similar apps on the market, particularly the FitBit app and the iOS Fitness app to understand their product offering and see where WeGlow can benefit from a similar experience. Particularly for the daily and weekly streaks, I looked at the Duolingo app, drawing inspiration from their fantastic user streak flows.
The initial discovery meeting revealed that the “My Journey” section was severely underdeveloped and needed a lot of TLC. Based on our discussions with the client, we have created a list of potential features that would revamp this section entirely to reward and engage WeGlow’s loyal community in a new exciting way.
Using the mind-map feature in Whimsical, we approached this section holistically and created an expansive list of such features that helped us shape the new journey section into a new power section of the app.
Wanting to reward and engage your loyal community with fantastic in-app features is admirable. However, implementing and designing an entire suite of new features can be a daunting task.
Based on the initial mind-map, special consideration was given to where and how these new features sit and how we split them up on the screens, without sacrificing great UX.
Upon further evaluation, we narrowed down the features to 4 areas/ tabs under the “My Journey” section:
Daily streak, weekly highlights, latest awards, goals and notes.
Progress photos with the ability to create progress photo collages to share.
Scheduled workouts, total steps, workout minutes, energy burned.
Workouts, streaks, guides, completed challenges, special awards.
One of the issues we had from the get go was that the app colour scheme was comprised of one solid colour, the WeGlow orange and a few shades based on it.
Due to the complexity of the new journey section, we suggested adding a few new colours that would work great with the existing colour scheme and would help us create new details that would stand out from the crowd.
After designing the new journey sections, I spent a great amount of time designing and creating a suite of medals for various achievements that would reward users for their hard work.
In total, I created 115 active medals (achieved) and another 115 inactive medals (to be achieved).
The client was very pleased with the deliverable outcomes and is excited to implement all new features in the app.
Before each area of the app was designed, we created user flows and journeys in Whimsical, in order to evaluate the users’ precise steps and to understand how it could simplify their journey to help them navigate through the new features.
At the beginning of the ideation and design process, we created detailed low-res wireframes to model the general flow of the new section of the app.
These were very low fidelity but served us well to quickly asses what features and layouts we should adopt on the screen, as well as to reduce friction and steps, wherever possible.
This helped me greatly in creating detailed UI screens in the design process.
All UI was created in Figma which allowed easy access for all stakeholders involved to view, comment, inspect and download assets directly from the design file.
I loved working on WeGlow, for many reasons, one being the multitude of ideas discussed in the beginning, culminating with the ideation and designing of these new features for the Journey section.
For WeGlow, I drew inspiration from one of my favourite apps on the market, Duolingo. Borrowing from the Duolingo daily streak philosophy, I was able to implement similar solutions by creating the WeGlow medals, streaks and stats.
Overall, the client was very happy with the new features designed and I loved creating and putting my ideas into practice.
