User Needs

The real needs of wearable and fitness app users

During the last two weeks, we interviewed many people about their usage of technology to maintain and extend their health and fitness. Our goal was to understand what, how, why and why not people are using applications or wearables to monitor their health. In this post, we share our main insights from the interviews.

Our interviewees are 20–30 years old and of both genders. To differentiate the needs of our users better, we ranked our users by their fitness level. We did this by asking a simple question:

“On a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is a couch potato and 10 is Usain Bolt, how fit are you?”

The lowest was a 3, the highest was a 8 and the average rank was a 6. So we asked a great variety of people about their integration of tech into their body maintenance procedure.

To empathize with our users better, we have to understand the drive and motivation of them to exercise. Therefore, we asked them why they work out. Some responded they want to stay fit for the demands of their daily life, others said they like to compete against others, while another fraction just want to be part of a community. To the latter,

“Sport is like Facebook, you can easily connect to new people”.

Surprisingly, 90% of all interviewees shared the feeling, that they used to be more fit. According to them, the drop in fitness was caused by stress of the daily life resulting in a loss of motivation and persistence. We think that everybody can relate to this eminent problem.

So can technology boost motivation? When being asked, if a wearable reminding of working out could boost motivation, people were sure that they would simply ignore it. However, for the interviewees a wearable showing that a friend has just been exercising is a great motivation. We found out that community has a great influence on an athlete. We even had one interviewee that started to run, because she was sick of seeing her father’s good Runtastic results posted on her Facebook timeline. She has been running for six months now and she is close to beating her father.

The example also shows how technology can trigger a change of habits in the user’s life. Wearable and fitness application users told us that tech rose awareness for living a healthier life. By seeing the actual numbers, people realized that they had to change their habits in order to stay fit and healthy. For instance, one of our interviewees started to walk 6km every day ever since he got his wearable.

Despite its great benefits, people both owning and not owning a wearable are dissatisfied by the current status of them. Firstly, the technical state is not optimal. The short battery life, the unhandy design and the manual synchronization gives the interviewees headaches. Secondly, interviewees were overwhelmed by all possible wearables and applications that are on the market. To them, it was not worth it to spend much time in finding the wearable that fits their needs. Thirdly, the most pressing issue our interviewees mentioned was the lack of valuable and understandable insights from the wearable data. In spite of showing valuable insights, such as the evolvement of the fitness level, applications only show the current data in a very raw state. Users are limited in time and hence want the wearable to assist them to understand extend their fitness level.

In the next 2 weeks, we will take a look at the current wearable and fitness application market during benchmarking. We will make sure that we keep you in the loop.