Inspire Fitness
Feature Highlight Reel
Organization
Inspire Fitness
Products
Inspire Fitness App
Project Names
Social Sharing • Victories • Heart Rate Connect • Quickstart
Role
Lead Product Designer
An Overview
Inspire Fitness App is a well-established gym equipment company that is working to establish their name as a connected fitness company; aspiring to provide high quality hardware with technological integrations and options to meet people’s fitness goals.
The following feature reel is the work put in place to help Inspire Fitness be a strong contender in the technology fitness industry; developing a mobile software that incorporates the expectations users have in a fitness app while providing a unique Inspire experience.
Feature: Quickstart
Before…
Before beginning work as the Product Designer, certain user flows had never thoroughly been addressed within the Inspire Fitness App. For example, in order to start a Quickstart workout with a Bluetooth bike in the app, users would only have access to bike metrics by tapping on an On Demand video. Users could then pause the video but allow the metrics to continue running, essentially creating a pseudo Quickstart workout. Unfortunately, this flow is not intuitive with many flaws which led to many complaints, believing that the marketed Quickstart was actually not an available feature.
After…
Quickstart is an essential feature for users who have invested in purchasing the Inspire Fitness bike that uses bluetooth connection to track metrics. It was important to be prominent for easy access and to be a fairly simple experience since most Quickstart users want their workout to be to-the-point, providing the metrics they want in an easy-to-read fashion. Research into various digital assault and air bikes, allowed for an understanding of the basic functions expected and how providing this in an app could be slightly elevated with better communication and extended capabilities. Expanded experiences included:
Providing Communication for paused workouts and idle bikes
Saving and viewing current and previous Quickstart workout data
Allow for Quickstart workouts to run in the background of other running apps
Upon creating the new experience for Quickstart, the complaint that users were upset that this feature was not available, went from the most common feedback to not having a related complaint since and has now become the on of the most commonly used feature in the app.
Feature: Social Sharing
Inspire Fitness has used Trainers to help foster engagement through social media. Making use of personal accounts, trainers have built up a community, mainly via Instagram, to lead a movement around motivation.
In order to create a more unified front behind the Inspire Fitness brand and bring in that motivational and engaging community into the organization, the ability to share workout summaries via imagery, became a highly requested feature by stakeholders and trainers.
Research behind general user expectations and a dive into metrics considered worthy of sharing were deliberately included along with marketable elements such as Trainers, Equipment, and content service. Having a strongly branded feature that was shareable across multiple platforms, within the realms of development resources, while still focusing on what users valued sharing publicly was an important balancing act.
Upon implementing the feature, it was important to pull metrics to determine if iterations with expanded elements to the feature were worthwhile. Metrics included:
Number of taps to “Share” action
Number of mentions on social media linked to social sharing
Number of times Trainers relied more on personal accounts to promote engagement
Feature: Heart Rate Monitors
The inclusion of allowing for heart rate monitor straps (unique to smart watch integrations) to be connected via the Inspire Fitness app came about because of extensive research into connected fitness, competitive analysis, and a large user base expecting this feature alongside the bluetooth connected bikes the organization is offering.
Looking into the highly requested feature, it was important to define the main user story to help define the product requirements. Looking into the user insights the story was defined as:
“As a user, I would like to see my heart rate so that I can pay attention to the progress of my fitness output.”
With this story, more research was conducted around general heart rate monitor compatibilities; bluetooth connection stability being the largest limitation consideration. Since bluetooth is a generally difficult feature to successfully implement, understanding the technology as best as possible and minimizing the initial iteration scope was important. From a user perspective, it was also important to regularly have communication available to help guide feature expectations. The research portion of this feature was the most valuable stage, as it helped to determine what can and cannot be successfully implemented. After extensive time spent in this phase, ideation and revisioning took place to come out with a first iteration design for development implementation that would fulfill the user story while not overwhelming resources with too large of a scope.
Upon implementation, the metrics to determine success and any consideration for expansion upon feature capabilities were:
Number of users connecting with heart rate monitor straps
Number of user connecting with heart rate monitor straps with bluetooth connected bikes
Number of users using in-app forms to suggest untested heart rate monitor models
