Getting people to use Fitness Products ? (3/3)
In this 3rd Chapter lets take help of Nir Eyal’s hooked model to analyze how fitbit/Strava get people on their platform and make them huff and puff. If you have missed out on the previous two please find the link
Step 1 : Get your Triggers to Action Right
Triggers : are the external ( through Adwords, social media campaign, Word Of Mouth, email subscription, APP notifications) or internal (emotional ) cues which leads us to use the product. The more intrinsic and frequent the triggers are the more likely is your product going to be used and hence more chance of success.
Fitbit being (Apple making larger strides here) the leader in fitness tracker devices has a strong brand presence for Starters who are looking out for an end to end solution. Starting in 2007 they have had a decade of strong community presence in both their self hosted community and third party communities like quora (23.3K followers and reddit (29k Active redditors).
On emotional level Fitbit caters to the emotions of Hope( pitched against the despair ) of making it through and strives hard to make sure that users are not overwhelmed by Goals. They break the goals into sub goals of Steps/Active hours/Water taken etc. which can be mixed through out your daily life. Have a look at their recent promotional video to feel the emotional touch of hope they wish to bring in.
Strava on the other hand lives and breathes on WOM for their external triggers to acquire customers. Both Reddit and Quora are verbose with some passionate contributions towards topics of comparisons of devices/ running tips and all the while sharing stats and numbers of performance. Infact i too was introduced to Strava by such an afficionado. They take their brand around community very seriously as is evident by the set of rules established by them as evident behind a strong community message posted on their community page.
Strava doesn’t need to worry about keeping its users motivated. What it worries about is keeping its users interested, challenged and excited about the next kick ass activity. They cater on two aspects “feeling of accomplishment”, and “Competitive Attitude” which roots from the central fear of bogged down by a boring life. Strava makes sure that users have access to the depth of technical terms of sports so as to give nerd minds something to work upon.
See the video yourself to understand how they inspire you to better things in life. If you are stuck with your life and have some time to spare why not get the life exciting again by taking up the next action packed hike or beating your friends at running duel.
Step 2 : Make sure generate enough motivation and convert that to action through minimal resistance in your product.
It involves how you get your users to do the desired action repeatedly. Fogg’s behavior Model says, to convert desired actions into a habit, user should have enough motivation to do the task, user should be posed with resistance interms of ( Money/time/labor/mind/ deviance from norm) and should have the triggers leading to the motivation to initiate another cycle.
Fitness,as i explained before, already asks too much from its users. Hence it becomes all the more tricky to keep users engaged with the product. Fitbit has a distinct advantage here as people already commit to their product by buying the device,yet suffers the most with people dropping off from the device.
Motivation : Fitbits gets its user motivated by building on “the endowment effect”.It keeps on crediting calories whether you wear device or not. Hence a push, auto nudge to do the extra activities to reach your daily goals. A constant monitor on your device and APP keeps you reminding of you how close or how far are you from your goal.A look at their social feeds of people celebrating every large and small success and stories of people moving up the fitness ladder builds hope for individuals who might have given up before. One more thing I really like is the chain effect : they make chains of days i have exercised continuously and show it to me to make extra urge not to break chain. Social motivation features like challenges are there where you can compete with your friends on one of the parameters ( #Steps/calorie burnt etc ) however not as much as Strava does.
Strava gets quirky here, as explained by one of the redditors
[–]silentvoyager
For me the coolest aspect of Strava is segments. I really like competing against other people or against my previous attempts. Sometimes I go for segment hunting where I plan my route ahead of time to include a few specific segments, go all out on those segments, and recover in between. For me that is a preferred way to run fartleks
The product is designed to celebrate(sometimes make you jealous) success of your friends on your feed to give that extra urge to pick up on activity and sometimes make you feel jealous about it. Strava has feature of following of people similar to Twitter. Although follow is an over abused term in social media context. Here if you follow people and get fitness goals achieved live updating on your feed and if you are competitive fitness nerd you are done for :P. I have friends in Strava who’s every day’s task is to track who has done what today morning and plan next activity. Recently they launched feature where you can follow celebrity fitness freaks, I am not sure of the uptake as often people give up easy if target is too hard to achieve
Go through this blog post for more details and share your thoughts.
Investment into community brand building has led specialized self club creation . If you need more motivation you have go to the clubs’ leaderboard.
Action : Our tendency to perform an action is inversely proportional to cost involved interms of Time,Money, Physical effort,Cognitive, how social awkward it is, deviance from norm i.e how personally awkward it is. Hence both product make sure that the only task which user does is do the physical activity and make sure all data are pulled, cleaned and displayed in consumable format. Bluetooth integration makes sure all data is synced to the APP an the APP takes care of the rest. Where they fail is to log Water & Food contents. I would love to have it solved from some kind of functions in heart rate, time of day and hand movement.
Strava goes the extra distance of making sure that its users are able to find next best activity for its users. You are in a new city and dont know where to go for a run look no further , they have section which identifies tracks for you in a city.
Trigger : this implies to the trigger we already discussed as one of the first drivers.
Step 3: Make sure to reinforce the motivation led Action through proper reward to induce repeat.
Rewards are necessary positive re-enforcement of motivation which lead to the execution of desired action. Rewards can be at an individual level rewarding individual action, the journey,which the user navigates through during usage of your product or the tribe with a social currency which user can use a sense or repute and belongingness towards a clan.
Reward the individual
Make user feel vindicated for the effort put in and make it variable to add to surprise element
“Starters” have a low threshold of giving up and getting back at slagging. I have repeatedly heard the sentence “I am ok to do anything as long as it doesn’t involve physical activity”. Hence it becomes all the more important for Fitbit to make sure that small success are celebrated, stored as memorabilia for sharing and feeling good about, always reaffirming users about the progress they have made through cumulative assimilation of their achievements. A sense of achievement helps people build hope that even though they slacked in between they can always get back at it.
Look at their dashboard they do just that. They go the extra mile through a combination of device virbation and UI animation for celebration. Badges,trophies and goals achieved are up for sharing with the world. It’s happy place for your small steps.
Strava works on a Linkedin like profile for you with various bells and whistles you can show off on. Look at this guys profile
He is a rockstar in fitness world. Look at the data granularity the data shows. It even has how long his shoes lasted. If i were a fitness freak i would love to compile all my data for that extra bragging points.
Reward the hunt
Make the user journey worth the effort.
Fitbit keeps on surprising me badges as weird as “You walked as much as the border of Italy” , “You have climbed enough steps to reach height where helicopter flies”, I mean who counts such stuff, but it does hell make my day. The surprise element does have its kick. I would love to have plans which i can build and track but hey this tool is for starters and not Aspirers. They have started adding plans, but all premium and in INR that’s a fortune :P
Strava has feature called “Segment” which keeps your hunt exciting.It starts with marking a specific stretch of road/hike etc which is most commonly used by other user. It will update you if you are nearing such a stretch and you got an opportunity to beat a leaderboard #Stravassholes. Most ineresting of all , i like the Route planner. People have been going crazy with it. The made a Goat in a Map. If that’s not rewarding enough what will be ?
Reward the tribe
This is where Strava shines compared to Fitbit and they really need it for network to grow. Members engage with almost every new feature and are very possessive about the feature present in Strava and don’t like any change which can make it similar to other social media. People don’t engage with your product if they don’t feel for the product passionately. Why is stack overflow so popular coz developers take pride in belonging to the developer community and with social currency which stackoverflow they gain opportunity to shine and gain social acceptance amongst their tribe.
Strava through a combination of Follow and Kudos does to try to achieve that. Imagine your celebrity athlete giving a kudos to your first attempt at 5K goes a long distance.
Talk about the tribe feeling : following is the git page of an individual who has built custom dashboard for Runners. Thats super nerd meets super athlete.
Step 4 : Make your user put in effort into the product
Quite counter intuitive but if users are made to work on your product post the perceived value realization they will value that extra work with high regard and keep returning to the product. The actions need to be designed around the generic behavior of a user to create least resistance. This will lead to user’s positive loop of doing more investment into your product with self appreciation of the right job done.
Fitbit lacks here as there’s hardly you as user can contribute much to the ecosystem (or else less advertised ). It’s a one way street where it’s job is to make sure user face the least resistance to physical task which is perfect for starters as they neither have time or patience to do it. The investment they wish from user is wear the device.Hence it becomes a bit boring when you slowly migrate from a Starter to an Aspirer.
Strava on the other hand does go a bit ahead giving user options to edit and annotate user’s own activities as means to track and evaluate their training plan. It has dedicated a whole section to its training plan section ( Paid ). You can annotate your daily activities post completion to create training completion. With extra control user gets invested with both the product and the behavior of continuing the training plans.User can invest time in following the right people
So are Vitamins not Selling ?
Please note that rating of Fitbit includes the rating for devices, where as Strava is immune to device relate . However both have almost same 260K ratings published.
A quick look at the Playstore rating clearly shows Strava having a better user rating with around 90% of users giving 4 and above ratings while only 71% of Fitbit users have rated 4 or more. An interesting look would be NPS score. Strava has NPS of 63% while Fitbit has only 25%.
Hence A Strava user almost twice probable to tell his/her friend about Strava than a Fitbit user.
* Assuming that each new user has sequential ID. I joined a week back and had a profile ID of 21176062. For Fitbit, the numbers are from 2016 Annual report.
** In 2016 Strava had booked 350mm activities up by 80% from 2015. Due to unavailability of data on exact MAU from Strava, i referred to this blog which had a quite interesting experiment done with MAU% as 15%.Assuming MAU increase proportional to increase in activities the current MAU(%) would be around 27%.17 ( up by 80% ) . Assuming each each user does only one activity per day.Fitbit in 2016 Annual report published 23.2mm MAU.
The table brings out an interesting inference ( if the numbers are true ) then Strava although has a better NPS and Ratings is failing to have higher MAU. The users who are active ( Fitness Freaks ) are having a time of their life while Aspirers like me are failing to engage. Hence although Strava has a lot of engaged user , those who are wannabes like me soon loose the steam in the platform. What they could do to change it is another post altogether.
However both are doing a fabulous job in terms of user retention( MAU %) if compared to industry’s 90 Day average mentioned below. I would say it to be a great feat as both Fitbit & Strava are pushing us off our couches remember :)
In conclusion follow the following steps and look for best practices in each domain suitable for your industry
- Understand your customer
- Build necessary triggers
- Help users complete tasks
- Reward users for completions of tasks
- Make user invest in your product by doing some extra labor.
Other parts
If you liked what you read, do follow me for more on product managements or simply what i am upto. You can follow me twitter hand “@Satism” or find me on LinkedIn satyajeet.tripathy
