Kikplan

Background

Fitness tracking start-up, Fitbug, saw an opportunity to develop fitness plans that worked with their wearable device, the Fitbug Orb, thus increasing revenue.

Fitbug needed an app to deliver its series of plans and accompany health-related content to prospective customers. Kikplan by Fitbug was a series of tailored 12-week fitness plans ranging from Gut Buster to Baby2Body that included articles, tips, workout videos and recipes curated specifically for each type of plan.

The app would also be compatible with other mainstream activity trackers, including Jawbone, Misfit and Nike Fuelband.

Objectives

Understand target audience needs and behaviours when engaging with health and fitness plans

Understand competitor landscape and identify areas of opportunity

Evaluate target audience pain points relating to health and fitness; identify opportunities to acquire, convert and retain customers

Define and design a customer-centric mobile app solution that delights customers and satisfies their health and fitness goals

Discovery

Stakeholder interviews were the starting point to understand business requirements and objectives. With a short 6-week time period given to deliver a validated solution, it was vital to gain as much subject matter expertise in a short time as possible.

Progressing with user and fitness consultant interviews allowed us to affinity map our findings. Themes were identified and gave us clear areas to move into the ideation phase.

Competitor and comparative analysis highlighted different avenues to explore solutions. Large blocks of vibrant colour, conversational UI, typographical UI and data-visualisation dashboards were some of the styles identified as possibilities to explore further and helped bring a focus to start initial sketching.

Sketching

Design studio sketching helped deliver numerous ideas on features, interactions and screen layout.

Sketches for home screen and activity overview

Sketches addressing user exercise and nutritional activity input

Prototyping and testing

Following sketching and ideating with the fitness consultant, we quickly moved into medium fidelity wireframing to flesh out core screens and flows we could test with users.

From discovery, we found out users wanted motivating and incentivising. Users told us this was crucial in helping them reach their goals throughout a 12-week program. So this was our focus for initial solutions.

Concept 1

Concept 1 confused users in testing. Vague and ambiguous were some of the words used to describe the original idea. It seemed we were too focused on keeping up with the latest UI trends over empowering the user with an informative and intuitive experience that helped them keep track of their progress and keep them motivated to reach their daily targets.

Designs progressed to a simplified direction that allowed users to go more granular in their desired journeys with less complicated interactions.

Concept 2

Initial high-fidelity prototype

User feedback

Themes from user feedback and additional critique from the fitness consultant told us the solution was now too minimal. It was too simple and not as helpful as it could be to inform users. In addition, daily progress was too vague, and more clarity on daily targets to hit, alongside more motivational elements, was the need to help users stay on track.

Progressing the UI

High-fidelity UI exploration continued. Following competitor and comparative analysis and initial research with prospective users, we moved forward with a more human conversational approach.

Large, vibrant blocks of colour to bring affordance to important messages and milestones, combined with elegant typography and data visualisation graphics to show progress, allowed us to communicate with users in a friendly yet informative way, encouraging their engagement with the app throughout the lifecycle of a plan.

Motivating the user with a personalised human messaging

Incentivise

Keeping the user motivated with the progress of their activity and daily targets. Badges can be collected when users reach targets and log to a global leaderboard of Kikplan users.

Progress

Users can view and engage with data visualisation of their activity, nutrition and lifestyle objectives, helping them keep on track and reach their short and long-term goals.

Final designs

Designs progressed rapidly over six weeks and followed rounds of iterations and feedback. Client-side developers situated themselves in our project war room, allowing us to develop and iterate the app more rapidly.

Working closely with the developers allowed for a lean approach helping us ideate solutions that worked both from a user need and technical perspective, meaning we could stick to the given project timeline of launching to the app store.

Kikplan by fitbug