Introducing HECA Fitness ⚡️
A balanced approach to a healthy life style.
The HECA mission stands for Health | Endurance | Challenge | Accomplishment
Let’s discuss what each one of them means for you!
Services:
Online 1:1 Coaching
Personalized Training Programs
Daily Motivation
Balanced Homemade Recipes Book
iOS App coming soon!
Project Duration:
2 months
Founder
UX/UI Designer
My role
About the project
Heca is a fitness app designed to revolutionize the way fitness enthusiasts approach their goals. This case study highlights the challenges faced by existing fitness apps and how Heca addressed them through user research and thoughtful design.
Goals:
By focusing on easy usability and personalized motivation, I aimed to create an app that resonated with users of all fitness levels and ultimately helped them achieve their fitness goals.
Discovery
Understanding User Pain Points:
Through extensive research and user interviews and surveys, I recognized several common pain points faced by fitness app users. Many users downloaded fitness apps but failed to engage with them in the long term, leading to discontinued subscriptions. Users often found the workouts either unsuitable for their fitness level or not aligned with their lifestyle. Moreover, complex user interfaces and lack of motivation were also cited as deterrents to continued app usage.
What I learned in detail:
a) Easy-to-use Interface: Users expressed frustration with complex and cluttered interfaces, leading to a lack of engagement and eventual app abandonment.
b) Personalization: Users desired a fitness app that could be tailored to their individual needs, fitness levels, and lifestyle preferences.
c) Motivational Features: Lack of motivation was a significant barrier to consistent app usage. Users wanted features that would inspire and encourage them to stay on track with their fitness goals.
d) Cost-effectiveness: Many users felt that existing fitness apps were overpriced compared to traditional gym memberships, making them less accessible.
Define
By prioritizing user needs, I put all of these insights and findings into a comprehensive and understandable format while creating a Persona that represents our users. This was important for Heca to refer to throughout the process and equally provided me with a clear understanding of who the user is and their needs, goals, pain points, and behaviors.
Persona
From gathering research I generated a persona by the name of Samantha to reflect our target user. The persona helps to put the relevant data collected about our users to the forefront and is an amalgamation of our users we researched, represented by shared Goals, Needs & Challenges.
Emily is a successful lawyer with a demanding work schedule. She finds it challenging to prioritize her fitness goals amidst her busy professional life. Emily understands the importance of staying active and maintaining a healthy lifestyle but struggles to find time and motivation to exercise regularly.
Some of the highlights are:
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Wants to consistently work towards her fitness goals, even with her busy schedule.
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Aims to maintain a balanced diet and monitor her calorie intake effectively.
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Seeks a fitness app that provides easy-to-follow workouts, as she doesn't have the time or inclination to create her own routine
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Struggles to find time for exercise amidst her demanding career, which often results in inconsistency.
Using this persona, Heca can develop an app that caters specifically to Emily's needs, providing personalized workout plans, motivation, reminders, and easy-to-follow recipes that align with her fitness goals and busy lifestyle
Problem Statement
Samantha is having difficulty finding time for exercise amidst her demanding career, which often results in inconsistency.
How might we help her keep on top of her fitness goals while also keeping her interested in the work outs?
To understand the current market we researched similar apps available, that have commonalities with Heca. Some of the brands we looked at were: Nike Training App, Strava, Peloton, Craigslist, GymShark Training
I used our research as well as comparisons with these brands to explore potential features to include in our design for the app.
After looking at the brands mentioned above and their features, we used a feature prioritization method to see what features we must, should, could, and won’t use in our design. Through this process and our research it was clear to us that the design should include the following features:
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Profile and Personalization
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Push Notifications & Reminders
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Goal Setting & Workout Plan
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Healthy Eating and Calorie Control
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Journal Record
Design
Knowing what was important for Samantha from my research collected, I began to sketch key features out with a design studio which is a great way to generate many ideas rapidly without having to lean on a solution at the inception of the product development process. With the persona's needs, pain points, and goals in mind, the primary focus for all participants is to quickly sketch out easy low-fi wireframes in order to accomplish the main goals.
Low-Fidelity Sketches
Welcome Screen
Sign Up Screen
Home Screen
Browsing Screen
A welcome screen with the logo and create an account button
A sign in screen to enter personal information such as Name, Birthday, Gender and Email
Home screen and landing screen for existing users. Includes a floating menu, personal calendar, users last recorded session details and health data to measure progress
Browse screen allows you to view a variety of courses and their intensity to chose from. Shows previous courses taken
Next Steps: High-Fidelity
After finalizing the low-fidelity designs, it was important for us to have a clickable prototype to test with potential users and get a baseline sense of our designs’ usability. The high fidelity screens and prototype are currently in progress. After finalizing and testing the high-functioning prototype, it is recommended to do two rounds of design iteration to produce MVP.