Lucid Athlete is a mobile app designed specifically for endurance athletes who aim to enhance their performance by optimizing their training and recovery. They eliminate the need for guesswork in training and recovery, providing users with highly personalized and practical insights into their health resulting in peak performance. Every athlete should have a comprehensive understanding of their health in order to perform at their utmost potential and rejuvenate when necessary. Lucid Athlete offers the solution.
Overview
I worked on a 4-person team of UX researchers to evaluate features for Lucid Athlete’s iOS mobile app Figma prototype. Lucid Athlete’s app is currently in the alpha phase and has limited functionality. The focus of the research was on uncovering what users wanted, needed and expected out of a fitness app to provide key insights on feature recommendations to TC Design Forge LLC. Ultimately, the findings instructed what features should be a priority for implementation for Lucid Athlete’s app that met both user desires and stakeholder goals.
Understanding the Problem
In a market where there is an inundation of expensive bespoke wearable devices that capture various health metrics like sleep, respiratory rate, heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen levels, sleep and body temperature, Lucid Athlete is looking to reimagine the what it means to truly understand your health. They want to work with what their users currently own, like an iPhone or an Apple Watch, to track essential health data that endurance athletes can easily interpret and make the best training and recover choices based on how their bodies are actually doing. Lucid Athlete wants to keep their app clean and simple, while also providing users with all the information and features they rely on to best manage their fitness and health goals. The team at TC Design Forge LLC wants to evaluate what their users truly want from Lucid Athlete and will prioritize any expanded features based on those findings.
Who are the users?
Primary Users
These athletes are looking to optimize their training to ensure maximum gains while also minimizing illness. They have busy lives, children and limited time to train. They also compete in amateur competitions and/or aim for Strava K/QOMs .
Secondary Users
These are lifelong athletes that are looking to stay healthy and active in a sustainable way. They participant in competitions and want to excel in their age range and/or aim for Strava K/QOMs. These athletes have more time, money and resources to commit anything that may give them an edge in their sport and help them reach their fitness goals.
Process, Findings & Recommendations
The bulk of the UX process for Lucid was spent employing multiple research methods to uncover what features were most important to Lucid Athlete’s users. Ultimately, identifying the areas of opportunity that could expand their current app’s capabilities, the research revealed what gaps were present and how the implementation of new features could meet the goals of Lucid Athlete and the users. The synthesis of the findings culminated in wireframe prototypes and annotations of key features that were provided to TC Design Forge LLC in a report.
Evaluate
Competitive Audit
To better understand the current state of the health and fitness app marketplace for endurance athletes, 8 direct and indirect competitors were examined. This provided clarity around actionable areas of improvement and opportunities for features in Lucid Athlete.
Identify
Prototype
Tech Scoping
Meeting with Lucid Athlete’s developer solidified the development budget and points associated with the proposed feature cards. It also defined the parameters of the problem areas, which lead to new design ideas. Together, the level of development work that would go into each feature and additional ideas illuminated which features would be important to move to the Kano Analysis.
Feature Cards
Feature cards were used to help prioritize, compare, and navigate through ideas quickly. The goal of the feature cards was to create a concise pictures of proposed features that Lucid Athlete could include in their app as development continues.
Wireframes
During the prototyping stage in Figma, I focused on creating designs with realistic aesthetics that adhered to Lucid Athlete’s branding. The app is currently designed for iOS and my designs followed the same guidelines. Users generally have an intuitive grasp of the design conventions around application interfaces associated with iOS products. It was important for me to ensure that what I was creating would be easily implemented and understood by Lucid Athlete’s stakeholders and developer.
Annotated Wireframes
Once my wireframes were complete for each feature, I spent time annotating each feature to increase clarity for anyone viewing them. I also indicated the goal of each feature and the rationale behind the choices. Each feature meets user goals and aligns with the objectives of TC Design Forge LLC for Lucid Athlete.
Recommendations
Based on the research and results from the Kano Analysis, my recommendations for Lucid Athlete’s app are to add pop-up metric cards for users to see their health trends in-depth and over time; to add warning notifications that alert users to changes in their health that could have a negative impact on their well-being; and to create a mapping & routes feature that will serve to support users training and recovery to achieve their best performance outcomes. As Lucid Athlete continues to grow, I believe that each of these features will play a critical role in user engagement and enhance user experience with the app. The recommended features also align with Lucid Athlete’s mission of putting actionable health information in the hands of endurance athletes to ensure the best outcomes for training and recovery.
Kano Analysis
The Kano Analysis allowed us to explore and measure customer needs for new features in the Lucid Athlete app. With 13 users, 13 feature cards were used to determine if the ideas were basic, performance/satisfiers, excitement/delighters, indifferent attributes or reverse attributes. The findings from the Kano Analysis instructed which features would move forward to the prototyping and recommendation stage of the process for this app.
Stakeholder Interview
To glean deeper insights around the goals for Lucid Athlete, a stakeholder interview was conducted. This provided greater detail on the business goals, technical constraints, current usability concerns. Having a solid understanding of the evaluation objectives allowed for enhanced planning and execution of research methods throughout the UX process.
User Journey Map
The objective of creating a user journey map was to better understand how users actually feel and interact with the product verse how the company understands their users interacting with it. Centralizing the customer allowed a deeper understanding of the ways the recommended features would improve the user experience and instructed next steps that could be taken to achieve an outcome that meets the goals of the user and Lucid Athlete.
Reflections
What I Learned
It was really exciting to work on an alpha phase app, like Lucid Athlete. It gave me a really deep understanding of every stage a new app needs to go through from inception to initial launch and beyond. I find a lot of joy in the evaluation phase of the UX lifecycle and I was specifically intrigued with the Kano Analysis method of user research. Initially, this approach seemed daunting because so much information would need to be assessed and synthesized. However, it was essential tool for me when determining which features were important to prototype and recommend. I appreciated being able to identify and focus on the features that matter most to Lucid Athlete’s users by understanding the balance of basic, performance, and delighter features that users were looking for. I am looking forward to utilizing this method in future projects.