“We don’t optimize for time spent in the app” Natalia Patiño, Freeletics

Published in

Mozza.io

4 min readJul 10, 2019

Freeletics is one of the fastest-growing sports app with more than 35M users. As part of our wellness interview series, we asked their Product Designer Natalia Patiño to answer our questions.

What does your product team look like?

We usually gather a Product Manager, a Scrum master, 1 or 2 designers and 6 engineers for each project. We’re a total of 12 designers, with different areas of expertise, from user research to copywriting.

Are you working closely with training experts?

We actually collaborate a lot with our in-house training specialists. They are former professional coaches and designed most of our exercice sets. Their input also influences the way the algorithm adapts workouts to our users' needs and capabilities and makes sure the training sessions are moving users step by step closer to their goal. In the end they define largely how the training experience feels for each individual user.

What’s your process to get insights from your users?

We have different ways of connecting with our users, depending on the type of questions we are trying to answer:
- We send out surveys to our Freeletics community.
- We visit local training groups in the parks.
- We ask users for feedback on Facebook groups.
- We use usertesting.com when we need a more diverse testing group or want to talk to a very specific demographic group.
- We setup an A/B Test for each feature launch. We use tools like Firebase to compare the new version with the previous one.

With all these, we try to test all dimensions of our proposed solution: user flows, interactions, information architecture, visuals, and copy.

What is the most important principle you follow when designing?

We don’t optimise for time spent or clicks in the app. We always focus on creating lasting value for our customers, that translates into positive impact in their lives. We track closely all the feedback we get through the app stores, the training communities and the customer engagement team to stay on the right track.

From a coaching and training perspective, we do not believe in competition between people, on focusing on being better than others. We want our users to become the best version of themselves instead.

What is the feature you’re the most proud of?

We recently introduced our Training Journeys, an alternative to the hardcore experience Freeletics is well-known for. Depending on their goal and preferences, people are now be able to choose between barbell training, high intensity bodyweight, or running for example.

The biggest challenge was to offer more diversity without adding too much complexity and decision taking moments for the user. There is still some work to do, but in my opinion this was a big step forward for our training experience.

Is there a feature you planned but eventually decided not to do?

We wanted to improve the feedback users can give after each workout. Currently we only ask if the workout was too hard or too easy, but we don’t know if the user enjoyed the workout session, if it was fun to do.

It would be amazing to have better understanding of our users’ personal preferences and the type of exercises they enjoy. But once we started exploring a few concept ideas and discussed them with the training and algorithm team, we realized that the complexity was much higher than initially thought.

So for now we had put it on hold unfortunately. I hope we can get back to it at some point!

Can you tell us 3 apps that you personally love?

Headspace: I love their in-app videos. They manage to explain pretty complex topics in a very simple way, so it never feels overwhelming. They are also really good at helping people to establish a routine and build a habit, which is key for wellness apps. I have to admit we do look at this app from time to time for inspiration.

Read our interview of Ken Seeno, Headspace’s Lead Designer.

Strava: They managed to create a real online community around sport, by allowing people to share their progress and statistics with like-minded people. Very well done!

Netflix: It’s magical how they always know what I like! Suggestions always feel relevant, which is astonishing keeping in mind the amount and variety of content they offer. One day we want to be able to offer the same great experience for training. We want to offer a big collection of training types, that allows all the different people out there to train in the way that best fits their needs and wishes. At the same time, we want to make sure the content each individual user sees always feels relevant and personalized to him or her.