How might we help our users overcome their mental challenges in the same way as their physical ones?

During their health and fitness journey, people aren’t just challenged physically. The journey also requires them to face a lot of mental challenges. With Audio Coaching, we tried to support our customers so they could overcome their mental challenges in the same way they do with their physical ones.

From Business perspective the amount of trainings a user does per week is limited, what makes training a low volume daily activity. As Training is the only value which we offer to our users at the moment, users are also more likely to open our app more seldom. We as digital product have the interest to create further touch points with our users to create a stronger relationship with them and bind them longer to us. Also we are searching for opportunities to extend our value proposition, which would make us stand out compared in the market and increase the interest in us (and our premium product).

The project involved overhaul more than 35 people with a lot of work streams, some of which I was more involved in, some less. This selection of content focuses on work streams I had significant impact on.

Reducing uncertainty.

Reducing
uncertainty.

Getting started with a completely new pillar of Freeletics

Since the beginning of Freeletics, the mental change during the users' fitness journey was anchored in the company’s vision. Seeing the tremendous rise of audio-based products like Calm, Headspace, and, the company decided to take a bet towards its vision by providing audio coaching for mental training.

To understand the project and the problem, the team took a couple of actions like desk research, customer and stakeholder interviews, and market research.

As a result, we came up with a guiding How Might We question, which helped everyone align and enabled the team to work on the project: How might we design an audio experience that guides users toward developing a mindset necessary for a long-term, active lifestyle centered on a healthy mind and a healthy body?

Define tests to validate the biggest risks early

The project was baked with hopes and expectations on every level. The core hypothesis' of the project were, that providing audio coaching for the users' mind will deliver an easier barrier to start and increase the frequency of usage of our application.

Together with my Product Manager I worked on defining test scenarios to validate these crucial hypothesis as soon as possible to reduce the project risk and inform further product decisions.

With the help of user story mapping and the team we developed a roadmap with the goal to incrementally ship our new feature and test our hypothesis.

Defining the success criteria

Does Audio Coaching increase the interest in Freeletics among users and potential customers?

Increase of installs and customer registrations.

Increase of active paying users.

Does Audio Coaching increase retention?

Increase overall retention/engagement on Day 1, Week 2 and Week 8 by consuming the Audio Coaching sessions.

Does Audio Coaching increase training activity positively?

Increase in training activity in Day 1, Week 2 & Week 8.

Collaborative process.

Collaborative
process.

Convert user journeys into design solutions

Together with our Content Strategist, I worked in the meantime on creating user journey maps for our new value proposition. Afterward, we converted these user journey maps step by step into an actual product experience.

Layout and Flow definition

Through this process and its deliverables, I was able to continuously keep  working with my colleague on the design system with the engineering team involved.

Test the real experience.

Test the real
experience.

Building the prototypes

As an audio experience was a new area for everyone in the company, we tried to build prototypes, which mimicked the real experience as closely as possible. Therefore I built an Origami Studio prototype, including error, loading, and audio-listening experiences. These prototypes enabled team to align better on what kind of experience we hoped to build, but also to test the actual experience internally and with potential customers.

Smart content recommendation

One of the main takeaways from testing with our customers was to have an "smart" contextual recommendation with use cases that also aligned with the business vision of providing a personalized coach AI. To do this, I defined some of our costumer scenarios in order of priority based on their training experience and usage of the app.

Learn from real customers

Learn from
real customers

Impact

This project was a big step towards Freeletics’ vision, but also a step into a new area. Therefore we designed an Early Adopter Program to understand how new and existing customers perceived and used our new offering. During this program, we will try to understand how our users interact with the provided content, evaluate new features with them, and especially investigate the relationship of our new offering with our existing one.

Results

Initially, we weren't as successful as expected in acquiring new active paying users, so we continued to iterate on different acquisition strategies in the Audio Coaching area to further improve these KPIs.

On the other hand, success was solid on retention and activity, increasing short-term (week 2) and long-term (week 8) consumption of the Audio Coaching and training activity, generally in the beginner Training Journeys.