BeFit

Product Experience

Customer and Need

The customer profile identified are those who consistently go to the gym and exercise at least 2+ days a week. These individuals are those who use the gym as a form of cross-training (for a primary mode of exercise), those who desire to have the most balanced physique, and those who want to reinforce their discipline in unlocking the intrinsic motivation to go to the gym.

Why Solve This Problem Now?

Revenue in the fitness application industry is expected to exceed $19.3B in 2023. Analysts project a CAGR of 14.3% from ‘23-’27, resulting in a projected market size of $33B by 2027. This market is currently saturated by major players such as Nike, MapMyRun, Strava, BTWB, SugarWOD, etc.

We saw that the key to achieve fitness goals is being motivated to attain the goal. In customer studies, 50% of respondents are motivated internally (self), while the other 50% are motivated externally (social media, comparison). We know this is a problem because overall, mental health has been on the decline. From 2019 to 2021, the number of U.S. adults seeking mental health help has increased from 19.2% to 21.6%. This may partly be attributed to the pandemic one can speculate; however, when mental health is on the decline, it stems to other aspects of a person’s life.

Problem Statement

How might we establish a tailored gym routine for a consistent gym-goer so that they can achieve their fitness goals?   We know this problem exists because we have all experienced people fall off their fitness goals because of a variety of factors.

We sent a survey about fitness goals to regular gym-goers (2+ days). We asked them about how they measure success. We discovered that the three most common ways people measure success in achieving their goals are:

1. Consistency
2. Seeing Progress & Improvement

‍

Solution Explanation

BeFit is a fitness companion that will keep you accountable for planning your weekly workouts,  going to the gym, and understanding your workout in a simple and intuitive interface. At the beginning of the week, you create your workout plan, and then during the week, the app reminds you that you should be heading to the gym at the time you designate. It boasts integrations with Google Maps and music integration to minimize the amount of manual process in routing to the gym!

The full solution will allow a user to feel good for accomplishing and checking this item off their to-do list, and we will allow users to share their progress on our upcoming social media platform and share it with their network! It will allow regular fitness goers to be more successful in their fitness journey because this application directly encourages consistency and seeing progress & improvement innately.

Lofi & Hifi Mockups

Lofis:

Hifis:

Iterative Design Learnings

User #1
Feedback

• When you have a Map for all the gyms, you don’t have the ability to go to that gym because of membership limitations.

• It does not create or encompass health. People who go to the gym, they might do other types of workouts at home. It’s not an accurate reflection of everything. If you’re trying to make an app, if it could reflect other types of exercise.
• Notification Fatigue - Is it effective? Unless you do it so yo

User #2
Feedback

• Notification Fatigue
• UI is cool in general.
• How would you do your own-at-home gym? 
• Pretty simple, user friendly.

User #3
Feedback

• Does not want to hit many buttons to add one exercise; rather, she wants to be able to type in the exercise and reps in a notepad style.
• The UI is easy to navigate.
• Feature of a one-time setup: setting her gym location, creating template/standard workouts for her
• Nike does a guided run (based on GPS) for however many miles you have done, and it makes you motivated.The Guided Run cheers you on as you go through the run.
• App might become too tedious hitting next everytime.
• Workout Templates!

Implementation Details

Technical implementation

Frontend : https://befit-colab.vercel.app/

Backend : https://befit-backend.codinger.net/

Code : https://github.com/Colab20-Team-5

Tech Stack:

Next.js, Sass, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB

Request Journey:

Request <--> Frontend <--> Backend <--> API(s) <--> Database

Technical challenges

• Figuring out the tech stack of Native application vs Progressive Web Application. The user journeys and stories mapped earlier seemed well for a progressive web application and the engineering team was very comfortable with it. However, after user interviews and updated stories, the requirement for an application suited more.

Right now the app is a Progressive Web App (PWA), but it could have provided a better UX if it was developed in native framework like Flutter / React Native.

• Guided audio generation via Artificial Intelligence.

Scaling Issues

• Not as such, the app itself is not a very big size, and can perfectly handle the inflow of traffic. App is deployed with proper DevOps cycles and CI / CD pipelines.

Key Takeaways:

• We experienced a proper journey from problem statement to a solution. Otherwise in jobs, only specific tasks are allocated. This was a new experience because we felt close to the product right from the initial planning stages.
• Agility, feature planning with the whole cross functional team, brainstorming was a nice takeaway. 
• Even though the project duration was limited, we took a proper product approach following the DevOps cultures, CI / CD processes right from the initial development, so that any changes made till the last moments can get immediately published into the live links and should not be stuck due to manual deployments or check ins to the server.
• The individual developers contributed and collaborated together in multiple areas. Resulting in situations where if a person didn’t have knowledge in a specific tech stack, it allowed them to get inspired and understand that particular piece of code from the experienced person.

Future Steps

Our next steps if we were to continue this project would be to incorporate this feedback into our product backlog and execute on these suggested improvements. We would also continue monitoring what other fitness applications are doing to ensure we are staying competitive on the correct feature sets for our persona:

Images