Fitbit Community Feed

My role: Lead Interaction Designer
Duration: 6 weeks

Punchcut partnered with Fitbit to create a social network for their platform. Users could already see each other’s steps, but there was no way to share successes, photos or build community with others. The Fitbit feed experience quickly grew to over 20 million active users and 4.7 million group joins within a year of release.

The Opportunity:

Create a social feed that inspires people to put down their phone and take action.

Define

Driving Action

The primary goal of the feed is to drive people to action. That goal can be accomplished by creating a habit loop of inspiration, action and support. The feed aims to educate and help users discover like-minded groups, facilitate offline connections, and makes it easy for users to share activities and accomplishments.

• Make sharing accomplishments super easy

• Users share and educate each-other on what worked for them

• Lightweight encouragement on posts

• Facilitate offline connection through free Fitbit events and community running groups

Concepting

We began with broad sketching on models for social experiences. We targeted the social experience to be centered around fitness and self improvement to match the Fitbit ethos. We explored several social media models ‘follow’, ‘friend’ and ephemerality.

A quick aside for bad ideas…

I’m a believer in the power of bad ideas to spark good ones. We documented the top three best bad ideas on this project some of which (ok, just one) became a project we designed later.

Solution 1:

Familiar patterns, but groups that inspire

With a large demographic of users in their late 30’s and 40’s and a very active Facebook groups, the Fitbit executives selected a model that resembles familiar social networks like Facebook and Instagram. The focus shifted to ensuring content was inspiring, action oriented and supportive. We leveraged groups as a way to follow content and connect with others.

Building the Feed

The aggregated feed is made up of content from friends, groups, and Fitbit news and evens. Prompts to share meaningful activities and accomplishments encourage participation and users can join groups of like-minded people.

Architecture and Navigation

A challenge we faced was integrating a social network into a single tab on the Fitbit App. We helped simplify the primary navigation and removed similar and potentially confusing areas bringing profile, friends, chat and notifications into one social space.

Easy to Share

A challenge we had was the empty dance floor problem. If no one is posting, no one will post. We approached this is two ways. First was to reduce the cognitive load by allowing users to post without having to write anything. Secondly, we created groups that users could join immediately to have content.

Textless Posts

We focused on achievements as the primary post type that users create. Since we know the users most recent achievements, we put that as the primary type of content, offering a gallery as soon as you tap compose.

Solution 2

Share Achievements, Not Opinions

We created multiple channels to immediately share achievements without needing to write a word or share a photo. Using the wealth of accomplishments Fitbit users achieve created a natural outlet for easy sharing of visual and celebratory imagery encouraging continued success.

Iteration and Review

We worked closely with Fitbit teams and developers to ensure that the solutions were feasible and addressed user needs throughout the experience.

Visual Design

We leveraged Fitbit’s existing visual patterns and built on their illustration and components to create visuals that fit into the app and brand.

Release and Reviews

The work we completed was implemented later that year and was nearly unchanged from the initial designs. The response was swift, and while the familiar patterns were called out in reviews, the community grew immediately and starting cheering for everyone and everything. The community feature is still a primary part of the Fitbit experience. The Fitbit app remains the #1 health and fitness app on both iOS and Android in the U.S.

Ars Technics “New updates make the Fitbit app more of a social feed and inspiration tool”

MacWorld - “Fitbit overhauls its app experience with groups and guided goals”

Press Release “Fitbit Community Grows to More Than 25 Million Active Users in 2017”

• More than 20 million people using Feed within the Fitbit app

• Users have joined groups more than 4.7 million times, ranging from fitness topics like running, swimming and strength training, to health subjects like hypertension, type 2 diabetes or heart health

• The Fitbit app remains the #1 health and fitness app on both iOS and Android in the U.S.