Momentä - The Fitness app

Product Design & Strategy (ongoing side project)

Background

What is Momentä

Finding the perfect Gym Partner. Simplified.
Workout Transcription. Revolutionized.

Momentä is the one-stop shop for reaching your fitness goals.

Why Momentä

Each and every one of us has found ourselves wanting to live a healthier lifestyle. Millions of people across the United States alone start each new year with the hopes of becoming more active, living a happier life, and making a change to their unhealthy habits. Whether it involves weight lifting at a gym or running outdoors, people make a valiant effort towards making the change.

However, most of these individuals lack something that can truly make the difference in living a healthier lifestyle.

What these individuals lack is - motivation.

What these individuals need is - Momentä.

My role

I lead the research and design of the Momentä app across iOS and Android, in this multi-disciplinary team of 3 engineers, 1 product manager and 1 designer.

User insights

I partnered with the product manager to uncover insights from literatures, interviews and surveys, and translate concepts into features that address user pain points.

Planning & scope definition

I defined the product with my product manager, and then share the vision with the whole team to reach common ground.

Leadership

I designed up and presented works to gain buy-in from engineers and pm throughout the project lifecycle.

Research

Literature Review

1. More motivation and workout partner are among the top factors that would lead exercisers to exercise more or non-exercisers to begin to exercise.

"In the present study, non-exercisers were asked to identify the factors that would lead them to exercise. Themes such as “more time,” “fewer demands,” and “more motivation” were consistent with the barriers identified in this study such as “no time,” “other priorities,” and “no motivation.” However, non-exercisers also identified themes including “workout partner or group” and “better facility location” as part of the top five remedies to overcome the barriers identified by non-exercisers."

-- Ebben, William, and Laura Brudzynski. "MOTIVATIONS AND BARRIERS TO EXERCISE AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS." Journal of Exercise Physiology Online 11.5 (2008).

2. Individuals tend to exercise more intensely when they exercise right to someone they perceive to be high fit.

Implications of this research might suggest that individuals attempting to exercise more intensely could benefit by exercising right to someone they perceive to be high fit.

A high fit individual might benefit more from either exercising alone or exercising with another high fit individual. Exercising with someone more fit than oneself could promote a higher intensity workout (Daley and Huffen, 2005).

-- Plante, Thomas G., et al. "Effects of perceived fitness level of exercise partner on intensity of exertion." (2010).

3. Aerobic exercise session with a partner tends to be longer than working out alone.

The participants in the study were divided into three groups that rode an exercise bike at a given percentage of their heart rate for time. The first group was a control, and they exercised alone. The second worked out with a single partner. The third group worked out with a single partner and was told that the results of their test were based on the partner with the weaker performance.

In the end, solo riders made it an average of 10.6 minutes on the bike before stopping. Pretty good. Group two, the ones that rode with a partner on screen, went on for an average of 19.8 minutes. That’s an 87% difference. The third group was on the bike for an average of 21.9 minutes, an improvement just over double than going it alone. Tell me that’s not impressive.

-- Irwin, B. C., Scorniaenchi, J., Kerr, N. L., Eisenmann, J. C., & Feltz, D. L. (2012). Aerobic exercise is promoted when individual performance affects the group: A test of the kohler motivation gain effect. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 44(2), 151-159.

Interview

We did 6 semi-structured interviews to learn about training from an overall perspective. Participants vary from joggers who casually run for 1-3 times on a weekly basis, to swimmers who receive intense professional trainings every day to compete in national tournaments. The huge span among different types of trainers provides us with a holistic view of what training actually means to different people.

Survey

We conducted an online survey in several sub-reddits relevant to fitness training, received 193 responses in total, with 111 of the respondents, which is 58% of the total number, being students. Also, we got tons of subjective feedbacks on what people seek from a fitness app, which helped form up our product principles.

Insights

General

Users don’t want to waste time in pairing up with partners to go exercising
Users want to pair up with certain type of gym buddies
Users need incentives or motivations to keep training
Users need an easy way to record their training progress
More than 60% of students train almost everyday (a large proportion of the samples are from Georgia Tech)
Students are more likely to train together with friends than other user groups

Target user

Students show more interest in pairing up with others to train, together with a higher potential of becoming frequent users of fitness-related services.

67% have systematically trained for some sports
64% train almost everyday

Train together VS alone

46% say they prefer to train alone, and the reasons are:

53% - I do not want interruption
43% - Easier to arrange time
40% - It is more effective
28% - It is hard to find a partner

25% say they prefer to train with others, and the reasons are:

78.57% - Friends encouraging each other makes it easier to keep on training
57.14% - I love hanging out with friends when training
32% - Others can provide protection while training

Training plan

80% - I have a training plan
29% - I make refinements based on others' plans
27% - I follow others' training plans
30% - I make the plan by myself with resources I find

Design

Experience principles

Simplicity
- Meeting gym buddies and scheduling training is easy beyond imagination.
Magical moments
- "Wow" moments happen naturally throughout the process of finding gym buddy.
Motivation
- Users feel super pumped and eager for training every time they open the app.

Marketing Strategy

Stage 1 - Together We Stronger

Promote the concept of "Motivation" & "Buddy"
Nature’s best motivator is competition and what better way to motivate you than to have someone that has a similar resolution train together?

Story