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 Challenge:
Create a social media experience that inspires people to move.
Goals
Make sharing accomplishments super easy
Allows users to share and educate each-other
Create lightweight encouragement on posts
Facilitate offline connection through free Fitbit events and community 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: 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 group, 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.
Interaction Design
Architecture and Navigation
We helped simplify the primary navigation and removed similar and potentially confusing areas bringing profile, friends, chat and notifications into one social space.
The Empty Dance Floor Problem
If no one is posting, no one will post. We approached this in two ways. The 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.
Solution: 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.
Wireframes
Visual Design
Release and Response
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. Several years later, the community feature is still a primary part of the Fitbit experience.
More than 20 million people use Communities 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.