Project Overview
hypefive is a social network for people who love fitness. The app motivates users through challenges and events, crowdsourcing them across all types of exercise and all fitness levels.
For one of its first post-MVP features, hypefive contracted us to design a “Recommendations” newsfeed so users could share playlists, podcasts, routes and videos from other platforms. This would exist separately from the main newsfeed of statuses, photos, events and challenges. hypefive also needed us to refine the way users could save Recommendations and organize their saves from the profile view.
My team researched many competitors, and we surveyed and interviewed users who share their fitness info on social media. We deployed a card sort to test how users organize saves, and we tested the existing Collections design. We tested users in three rounds as we moved from low- to high-fi wireframes.
Our research and testing pointed us to a larger problem with the structure of the app: users didn’t understand why there was a separate newsfeed for Recommendations. We discovered that blending the main and Recommendations newsfeeds led to about a 25% decrease in time on task, and it led to greater overall satisfaction with the app and more confidence in learning the app. We also brought the Collections functionality up to the standards of its competitors by providing a central repository for all saves, privacy settings, flexible organization methods, and an in-app browser, among other features.
My Role
C&C Analyses, Survey, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiries, Card Sorting, Synthesizing, Prototyping, User Testing
Platform and Tools
Figma, Optimal Sort, Google Suite, Adobe XD, Zoom, Notion
Team
Val Langston
Steph Ma
User tests showed this change decreased time on-task by almost 25%. With the Home and Recommendations feeds blended, users said they were more confident using the app, fewer users said the app was cumbersome or awkward, and users picked up the app more easily, according to our system usability scale.
45.8% of users surveyed wanted to share articles, and 37.5% wanted to share products, a natural segue to sponsored posts or strategic partnerships.
62.5% of users surveyed did not want to leave the app to follow links.
Reduce the existing flow from four screens to one, based on user interview feedback.
The existing design filed saves by media type, but only 10% of users wanted to organize that way, according to card sort data. Users filed their saves and named their folders in a variety of ways—by sport, by topic, or in their own creative way.
5 in 6 competitors gave their users:
