Zeal

Responsibilities

Zeal is a design project I pursued to explore creating value for users within an existing product. I aimed to develop an experience to encourage long-term engagement and meet user needs in the fitness space.

The project is in the prototype stage, but I would enjoy the opportunity to develop it further.

Listening to people

I interviewed five individuals who regularly exercise and recently shared fitness content digitally to understand what motivates them to engage in fitness social sharing.

Following the interviews, I synthesized the research through affinity mapping, personas, and empathy maps. I created two personas and empathy maps for Ava, a private person on a fitness journey, and James, a fitness enthusiast looking to learn more. I identified the following core findings:

• People find delight and affirmation in sharing personal fitness accomplishments with loved ones.
• Social sharing of educational content creates opportunities for learning and discussion.
• There is a stigma against poor performance, which drives people to be more private about fitness.
• People are self-conscious about the perception of being too involved in fitness, so they don't share everything they'd like.

Scoping the solution

I needed to tap into people's desire to share fitness achievements and educational content to add value to the app via messaging. I also wanted to address the stigmas that detracted from user engagement in these activities:

1. Privacy for poor fitness performance; and
2. Perceptions of over-involvement in fitness.
   

I started developing user journeys around sharing workouts and posting fitness content within the app. I focused on giving users more control over what metrics they share to address concerns about poor performance. I also developed a social feed to complement the messaging functionalities, create a forum for educational content, and dedicate space to sharing all forms of fitness-related content.

Sketches and prototyping

I sketched different iterations of each screen and found inspiration in other fitness apps for design patterns. I conducted guerrilla usability testing to improve the user flow in the final sketches. The testing led to three main changes:

1. Added a clearer entry point and confirmation steps for users saving a workout.
2. Redesigned the options for selecting metrics to post when sharing workouts with others.
3. Simplified the group chat creation flow to reduce ambiguity about required steps.

Developing a brand

Zeal's brand is friendly, humorous, and motivational. When engaging with the app, users should feel they are interacting with a friend who encourages them. I found inspiration from similar brands and built a mood board to determine Zeal's UI elements.

Iterating with feedback

I conducted usability tests with five participants. I asked participants to log an activity, share a workout, upload a post, and create a group chat.

While all participants finished the tasks, there were still opportunities for improvement. I ranked the prototype issues and iterated on the following core areas:

1. Added more options for closing overlay screens throughout the product to give users more straightforward navigation.
2. Introduced a new confirmation step for adding images to a workout post so users receive more feedback when completing this action.
3. Expanded feed content to include more information about social engagement with posts.

Reflections

This design prompt was interesting because I was tasked with developing a specific feature instead of designing for a user problem. This challenged me because I had to understand user motivations to ideate messaging features that would bring value. I enjoyed the prompt and look forward to building on this experience in future projects.

If I had more time for Zeal, I would continue iterating on the user journey to create more entry points for messaging others on the app. There is potential for new forms of engagement with additional messaging features.