Healthmonk
A mobile app aggregating a variety of fitness activities such as Gym, Zumba, Badminton, Yoga, Swimming etc across different fitness centres in any area. It allows users to access services on a per session or on a monthly basis.
The idea
It all began when I lost about 8kgs in 3 months by working out and inculcating healthier habits. It was an extremely difficult task, after a lot of research on internet and a couple of books later I had a fair amount of idea on how to lose weight but this got me thinking that there were no great solutions in the market which could help people to easily know how to be healthier.
My Role
After the idea, I did surveys and user interviews to validate my hypothesis, I would be talking about the details of the research in the next section.
Many meetups and networking sessions later, I was able to set up a team with expertise in engineering, design and business. I was responsible for ideating features, creating mockups and visual designs, conducting UTs with prototypes and reiterating based on feedbacks. I coordinated with the dev for the MVP and worked with our business counterpart to come up with a brand & marketing strategy.
User Research
Scope | Understand the problem areas of the users and validate if the users find it difficult to lose weight and be healthy.
Target Segment | 20–35 years from Tier 1 cities belonging to SEC A.
Method | Semi-structured interviews with 30 users for qualitative and a survey with over 500 users to get quantitative information.
Objective:
- Understand if the users are interested in being healthy, their motivations to workout and other healthy habits
- Understand the main reasons why users quit and pain points in the existing solution
Offerings available in the market
- Personal coach to suggest exercises and diet plans (Healthifyme, Urbanclap), manage calories with a tracker (My Fitness Pal), fitness bands to track your workout (Fitbit, Mi band), watch videos online and follow workout at home (Sworkit)
Understanding our users | On the basis of the surveys and interviews we came up with 2 user personas for our product.
I get bored doing the same exercise everyday, I seek variety.
I don’t go to the gym that often even after taking a membership, it feels like I am wasting my money.


Opportunity areas and findings
- Over 50% users quit working out as they get bored of a particular activity and 72% of the users workout less than 5 days in a month
- On an average, users are willing to spend Rs.1000–1500/month for working out. The general feeling is that they are not going to utilise their memberships fully as they will get bored or busy along the way.
- One of the most common triggers is upcoming life events like weddings, vacations etc for which users start working out.



Following are the list of reasons why users quit working out:
Expensive | People pay monthly/ yearly fees to gyms and fail to show up which leads them to stop buying fitness memberships.
Seek Motivations from others | People want to workout in groups, it gives them a push to keep the workout going.
Boredom | People seek variety in working out as it gets boring along the way.
Information Overload | Information available online is scattered and there is no great and cheap source to validate
Our Value Proposition
On the basis of the above findings, we decided to solve for information overload, variety and boredom.

Job Stories
When I start working out, as a beginner I want to try a few activities so that I can decide what I like.
When I workout only 5 days a month, I don’t want to pay for the whole month so that I don’t feel that I am wasting my money.
When I work out regularly, I want a change in my workout routine so that I don’t get bored.
When I travel out of my city for a long time, I want to continue my workout so that I don’t lose touch.
User Action Map | Designs

1. Booking a fitness activity
Users can book from a variety of activities available at various timings across partner centres and filter the choices by location, time, ratings etc.
Why?
- Over 50% users quit working out as they get bored of a particular activity and there is no flexibility to choose from different activities
- Over 72% of the users workout less than 5 days in a month.
- If the user is travelling for a longer duration, she needs to take another membership to workout.
Existing options | Users can join Cross-fit centres that have multiple activities or they can buy multiple memberships across different centres.
Explorations | We created different approaches to understand how do users book any fitness activity and how can we make the booking experience intuitive for the users. We were trying to solve for:
- Does the user decide a time or the activity or the fitness centre first? What is the most important factor in booking? Is it location, time or price?
- Is the user sure about what to book or looks for recommendations? Do users book just for themselves or they take friends along with them?



Research insights
About 75% of our users first decides an activity while booking a session and they were easily able to choose an activity without recommendations (it might have been good to have recommendations, it was difficult to build owing to a small team). Location turned out to be the most important factor incase the price difference was within 20%. Over 30% of our users mentioned that they would be booking for their friends.
Final Flow | Happy path for booking a session for a particular fitness centre


Key Understandings and Impact
- Users go to review section of a fitness centre page before making a decision to book for the first time (even though the ratings were available upfront)
- 70% of our users booked less than 6 sessions a month which gave us a baseline to price our fitness pass accordingly.
- Users booked their sessions in advance for the entire week and most of the sessions booked too much in advance were not attended by the users.
2. Buying a fitness pass
It is a monthly subscription allowing users book sessions across different partner centres. It is cost effective and users don’t need to pay at every transaction hence making the booking experience faster and smoother.
Why? Most of the users go to a fitness centre less than a week in a month so it does not make sense for them to pay for the whole month.
Explorations | We wanted to understand the user behaviour:
- Do users prefer to buy per session or they prefer a fitness pass?
- Do users understand the concept of a monthly fitness pass? Is the booking experience using the pass intuitive?


Final Flow

Key takeaways
- The concept of Fitness pass was new for the users and hence was difficult to understand.
- After introducing this features our bookings went up by 50% as the users didn’t want the hassle to pay every time for each session.
- Over 80% of our users went for a monthly pass instead of booking per session
3. Other Features
Onboarding experience | Help the first time users to understand the core propositions of the product.

Promotion Strategy
We needed to get traction on our app, we tried multiple promotion strategies- Referral, First booking free campaign, in app notifications, Corporate Stalls, Google ads, Facebook ads and organise fitness events across the town.

What did our users say?



Things I would do differently now
We got a lot of calls to understand the fitness pass benefit, I would have tried to explain it better to the first time users. Our approach was to make the user try our services via pay per session and then progressively introduce the pass.
I would make the discovery of fitness centres from the homepage more easy for the first time users. Also I would have introduced session based passes like 5 sessions or 10 sessions so that the user doesn’t feel that he is over paying. I would have invested more time in building the brand personality.
