A. 18-22 yrs old: This group belongs to the College going students who are keen on working out.

B. 23-35 yrs old: This group belongs to the Busy professionals.

C. 36-45 yrs old: Fitness conscious group who either are well aware about the importance of fitness or are beginners who need complete guidance.

Q. What is the expected business outcome for the product?
A. Keep the users engaged to the app so as to increase retention rate.
     Being competitive in online fitness app category.

Based on the target user defined earlier, I conducted interview sessions with them to understand their lifestyle, difficulties they go through to keep themselves fit, what are their aspirations and what motivates them to follow their fitness regime without fail. My questions were based on need, time and expectation.

Few of the questions were:

1) How often do you workout?

2) Will you prefer workout at home or gym?

3) How much time can you spare daily for workout sessions? 

4) What is your preferred time of the day for workout?

5) Reason for working out?

6) What challenges do you face in your training?

7) How much knowledge or experience do you have about workouts?

8) What type of workouts would you prefer?

9) What would be your target areas?

10) What all features would you like in a fitness app?

11) Would you prefer a customized diet plan included in your fitness plan?

12) How do you keep yourself motivated or engaged in these activities?

1) Age- 33 yrs old

2) Married with 2 kids

3) Works as HR Manager

4) Have limited time 

5) Too much occupied with work and home responsibilities

6) Can’t spend much on paid fitness services

Empathy map helped to understand what users say, do, think and feel, which gave me their pains and gains.

Pains:

1) To get information from various resources.

2) Is confused due to lack of guidance.

3) Unhealthy eating habits due to no proper diet plan.

4) Tries to learn about nutrition on her own.

5) Can’t keep herself motivated for long.

1) Wants an app which can provide proper guidance on training and diet plans.

2) Wants a personal trainer or buddy to keep herself motivated consistently.

3) Wants to keep track of her busy schedule and constantly being reminded of her sessions.

The interview helped me understand where users are facing problem and how they can be solved, which gives a list of features that I can have in the app to improve user experience.
After completing the interview process, I got a list of features which the users want in their app.

1) Diet plan, workout exercise and track progress

2) Food Macro list and Calorie Count

3) Customize workout plans

4) Motivational music

5) Workout plans as per target areas

6) Reminders and timers

7) Workout videos with instructor

8) Different types of workout options

I did analysis of two apps namely, Strava and Cure Fit, which belong to the fitness genre. Details are shown in the below image.

Here, in order to determine Information Architecture ( IA ), I performed Card Sorting to understand which feature fits best under which section.

After the IA of UBFit App, I worked on the user flows for easy navigation by the user and satisfactory user engagement.

So, finally after all the user flow was ready, I thought of proceeding with hand drawn sketches while keeping in mind the major objective for designing this app i.e. increasing User Retention Rate. 

I drew two alternatives or early prototypes based on this idea for the app.

Undertaking heuristic and interview based user evaluation, I selected Alternative 2 as the way forward, but improved it with some features from Alternative 1 which were found to work better in the evaluation.

Before designing the final prototype, I conducted Usability Testing by sharing the prototype link with the users and asked them to use the app and explore the various features in my vicinity, which in turn would help me figure out what exactly are the problems faced by the users.

The Problems and Solutions are mentioned in the table below:

After all that, I prepared the final prototype which you can see in below.

When it was time to figure out the UI Components, I decided to stick with Google Material Design as I was designing for Android and chose the default Android font i.e. Roboto. 

While designing, I strictly followed Google Material Design Specs for all the element sizes, spacings, margins, etc.

Later on, when it came to Color Palette, I wanted to choose those colors which signify the importance of Fitness.

Therefore, I chose Teal Green and Orange as they symbolize:

Teal Green: Creativity, Inspiration, Credibility, Reliability, Spiritual Development.

Orange: Joy, Enthusiasm, Happiness, Creativity, Determination, Success, Encouragement and Stimulation.

In a field trial with around 10 users, I found that these video training sessions helped users to be encouraged towards working out at home in their own surroundings, since they were able to workout without a physical trainer by just following the sessions at their desired time of the day, rather than skipping the gym due to some reasons.

But in my journey I also learnt a few lessons. I found that the user didn't have 100% control over the app. For instance, the user cannot control the quality of the videos to reduce their data usage. For this users should be given a default option to control their data usage as it is provided by apps such as Netflix.

Also, a web-based product could also have been developed. I didn’t have the budget or time to address this challenge, but in the future, I could revisit the project and focus on collaborative aspects of this app.

One major challenge I discovered was that to keep the users engaged to the sessions, the Client or Stakeholders need to record and hire trainers with good energy and communication skills. This aspect is a major one in increasing the Retention Rate of the app.