I worked at Jefit during the year 2019 - 2020. During the time span, I helped to add features like the rest timer, advanced progress report, onboarding, and so on, to unify the UI design by re-creating the design system and introducing the dark mode for the Android version. I also helped to revisit the subscription model by user research insight. We took a growth-hack-centered approach that every two weeks we sit down as a team to generate ideas and evaluate the priority by ICE. This case study is demonstrating one project I led and worked on - onboarding experience.
201903 - 201906
UX Researcher | UX Designer | Growth Hacker | Product Owner
Ying Ling (Founder) | Jason Gong (PM) | Sean Schlaefli, Huy Nguyen, David Pao, Richard Wong (Engineer)
Figma | Zeplin | Amplitude | Optimalworkshop | App Analytic | Google Analytics
If you are not a gym workout enthusiast who loves tracking performed exercises, you might not hear of Jefit. But if you are, you must hear of it somewhere or at least have been recommended by one your gym buddy or friend. Jefit has been reported as one of the best workout app by Men’sHealth(2018,2019),Men’sJournal,USAtoday. Specialized in gym workout-tracking, Jefit has a database with more than thousands of exercises, routines and you can customize it to track any workout as much as you need. With more than8 million users, Jefit is undoubtedly popular among gym goer. However, it’s not known for being user-friendly or good user experience.
The main value that Jefit is providing is:
As you can tell, it’s a niche yet a very comprehensive app providing integrated service from head to toe for gym-goers. Thus the navigation in the app could naturally be challenging.
While I got access to the NPS report collected, the lack of user-friendly and poor UX has listed as top features needed to be improved (link). Because there was no former in-house design team, I couldn’t obtain other more in-depth user research data.
To dissect the UX issue, I took a quick contextual interview with 3 friends. From the observation, the sign in and on-boarding question is easy to follow. But while the user enters the first screen, the crowded interface filled with options confused the user where to start. If you play with the app longer and be patient enough, you will be vowed. But unfortunately, on the average app will be deleted in 5.8 days since they first installed which leave the margin of making mistake on the first screen is thin.
The use of design language didn’t empathize with the actionable button/tab. Instead, the journal style design delivers a feeling of this app is for content consumption rather than its true skin is more a functional utility app.
Then I zoomed in the onboarding user journey to evaluate the navigation usability. By listing the app structure based on functionality rather than the screen simplify the problem by letting out the UI issue. You can see there are unnecessarily repeated function models also dead-ends in the flow which causes confusion while the user navigates through the app.
After diverging the problem, I summarize the question into three categories:
And also at this stage, I chose to focus on the experience targeting the user on-boarding/user activation.
💡Based on that, the focus is HMW grab user’s first attention and allow them to identify core value ASAP
After redefining the problem statement, I decided to make changes from three aspects. One is to change the layout of the first screen to make the core action more pop-up. Two is to change the overall Information Architecture a little bit - to erase the unnecessarily repeated function module and also to link some dead-end flow which has a close relation with core functions.
The last but not the least, from the monetization standpoint, based on previous research, more than 95% of the user purchased the app upfront even before they started the first workout. So I proposed the change of user flow to bring upgrade from content more upfront. Meanwhile, the user is still guaranteed a choice to skip and use the product for free.
Onboarding a user is not just when the user finished the sign-up and tried the core function for one time, but until they find the “Aha” moment of gaining value and build the habit of using the product. So the next step, I will focus on the experience of user tracking a workout. Tracking a workout can be separated into three parts: review previous progress, track current exercise, and end the workout.
To start, Jason and I started to collect screen recording footage from the current user while the engineers implementing the on-boarding flow. From the video analysis, we gained insight into how the user will behave differently during the tracking based on their fitness level, experience with the product, and fitness goal.
At the end of May, after we implemented the upfront paywall monetization flow, we also implemented event tracking to see the ratio of skip/upgrade. From the data, we saw people highly likely skip the paywall. However, we experienced an overall increase in revenue. For further optimization, we A/B/C tested different combinations of workout plans and picked the one with the best performance of conversion rate and LTV.
Because the implementation and iteration involve confidential information of the company. Here listed the timeline of the project. At the top is the time spend for each step and the tool has been used. Below is the in-between deliverable for each step.
Before we started the project, we would like to pick a metric to gauge this growth experiment’s result. Since this is mainly targeting the user activation, so user activation rate (in this case we define as the funnel conversion rate from the sign up to finish the first workout).
We made a change on the on-boarding monetization funnel, so we also expect an increase in revenue from the subscription at the end of the project.
Our initial hypothesis is that we are expecting an increased user activation rate. From amplitude, the conversion rate from sign up to finish the first workout is slightly increased in a humble way. We zoomed in to see what’s the conversion rate from the sign up to start the workout, surprising, we see a decrease in the conversion rate.
While we were implementing the new onboarding flow, the team also implemented other features which could combine the influence on the activation rate.
However, we got a solid endorsement from monetization. Since mainly the upgrade in our user base happened upfront. Changing the on-boarding flow, providing a straightforward way for the user to upgrade has boosted our revenue by 40-50%after two months we implemented the new user interfaces and user flows.
In this project, we saw a huge increase in our revenue as we expected. On the other side, we didn't see a noticeable improvement in our user activation rate, which is our main objective of this project. However, we do see more positive reviews from the app store and NPS scores feedback.
As an apprentice of growth, I learned from this experience:
As a raising UX designer in the enterprise world, learned:
