Rebuilding a fitness app after COVID with a Design Sprint

How we worked with Possible to rebuild their app and create a resilient, digital-first business model after COVID

This is a story about a Design Sprint. If you’ve never heard of Design Sprints, you can learn more here or read the book.

Possible is a nutrition-based healthcare company that is on a mission to make the world healthier and lighter. Its three-pronged approach helps people lose weight through consultations with personal nutritionists, customised meal plans based on superfoods, and app-based mentoring.

Before 2020, Possible had a thriving business — over 40,000 customers and offices across 12 cities in India. However, its in-person sales model suddenly became unthinkable when COVID hit. Suddenly, Possible needed to find a new path forward.

We partnered with Possible for a three-month collaboration, starting with in-depth research and ending with a highly polished, complete design for a new app that would help them acquire new customers online and build a sustainable, digital-first business.

We’re Parallel, a Product Strategy & Design Studio based in Bangalore, India. We run Design Sprints, Design Jams, innovation workshops and more to help innovative organisations create powerful digital products.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how we worked with Possible to rebuild their app and business model from the ground up with a Design Sprint.

The impact of COVID on Possible’s business

Before COVID, Possible’s model hinged on its network of over 100 nutritionists and doctors.

New customers started their Possible journey with free, in-person consultations. Customers were then connected with a personal health coach and customised meal plans. They were also encouraged to sign up for the Possible app, where they can track food intake, build better health habits, and learn about the science behind better eating.

This model crashed when COVID hit the world. Suddenly, Possible couldn’t conduct in-person consultations, and the business took a serious hit.

Possible’s founding team knew that this was an opportunity to reinvent themselves and create a digital-first business, based around their existing app. However, with its low conversion rate, the app wouldn’t be able to replace in-person consultations without a facelift.

Weeks 1–2: Laying a solid foundation with user research

Instead of jumping straight into a Design Sprint, we started by investigating the customer segment that Possible was targeting. We did three weeks of in-depth research to learn everything we needed to know about Possible’s competitors, customers and current app.

Investigating the competitor landscape

After identifying nine leading fitness apps for Possible’s target audience, we did product teardowns to analyse what made each app succeed. These delved into seven key aspects, such as user navigation flow, engagement strategy and wow factor.

Analysing the existing app’s UI/UX

Our design team dove deep into the current Possible app to assess what was working and what wasn’t. They found a wide range of issues that needed to be fixed:

• Inconsistencies in the app’s colours, fonts, layout, images, navigation and information hierarchy
• Onboarding that overwhelmed users, rather than guiding them through the app
• Text-heavy pages that led to cognitive overload
• Nested hamburger menus that made navigation more difficult
• Inefficient use of screen real-estate with overly frequent pop-ups

Learning from current customers

We also turned to Possible’s current customers to learn why they had picked the Possible app over other options.

Our user research centered around five research questions:

1. What are people’s beliefs around food?
2. What motivates them to go after a diet plan? What stops them from it?
3. How can we engage our Possible customers more?
4. Why did they choose Possible?
5. What other apps do they use on the side? Why?

To get a wide range of perspectives, we conducted in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of users. This included people in different stages of the user journey (not signed up, new free user, free user for 3+ months, new paid user, paid user for 6+ months, etc.), age groups, BMIs, locations, etc.

The result was a treasure trove of detailed insights on what people loved and hated about Possible. Most notably, people had trouble remembering basic app capabilities, found core features like the Health Score confusing, and struggled to stay motivated over time.

Week 3: The Design Sprint

Aligning everyone on the same goals

With loads of primary and secondary research under our belts, we were excited to kick off a Design Sprint with the Possible team. Because of COVID, this happened remotely over Zoom.

Since we were taking on a full app redesign, it was important that everyone was in sync on what we wanted to achieve. However, everyone from Possible came in with strong but divergent ideas about how the app should change. We ended up with over 100 diverse HMWs, covering everything from targeting new audiences to gamifying the app.

It was understandable that we ended up with such a wide range of ideas. Changing the app was critical, so everyone had been worrying and thinking about the problem a lot. But we couldn’t explore all these directions.

This was a big strategic decision, which would normally be stressful and time-consuming. However, the Design Sprint reduced the stakes and made it easier to pick just one direction. In just a week, we knew we would have the data we needed to either move forward or go back to the drawing board. If we got it wrong, we’d only have lost a week, rather than months of development effort, time, and money.

Here are the How Might We statements the team ended up picking to focus on during the sprint:

We also created a two-year goal for the app:

We then created a set of questions to check during user testing, which would validate if our Design Sprint was successful.

Stretching our creative muscles

With an ambitious goal in our minds, everyone was excited to transform Possible. We entered the sketching phase of our Design Sprint, and creativity was in the air.

After everyone created detailed sketches with their visions, we did several rounds of voting to pick our favourite elements and, ultimately, our favourite sketch. We then expanded this sketch into a user flow and storyboard, which mapped out every page for the new prototype.

We decided to build the app around the core concept of challenges. Every day, users would face a new challenge designed to help them eat healthier, stay motivated and build better habits. We thought that breaking big health goals into small, daily actions would help people stay engaged and steadily make progress.

Creating a detailed prototype

Our design team turned the sketches into a digital, interactive prototype in just a day. Since the stakes were high, we did a couple more iterations on the prototype with the Possible team to be certain we had our new concept right.

Checking if we were on the right track

We thought the new Possible app was great, but would it actually achieve what it needed to? Would users even like it?

To get real user data quickly, we tested the prototype with five users. We recruited participants who were the perfect fit for the product and were struggling with problems that the app intended to solve. We ended up with a diverse set of user testers, from product managers in startups to homemakers in Tier 2 and 3 cities, which gave us interesting insights to help us decide on our next steps.

Here is what users said about the prototype:

“The challenges are definitely exciting. It’s good to track specific outcomes.”

“I found the challenge videos interesting and the philosophy useful.”

“I would keep doing the challenges. I like the day-to-day approach.”

When the Possible team saw the video clips of our user tests, they were stunned to see the deep insights the tests revealed.

The overall feedback was great and validated the app’s new direction. Every user we tested gave a big thumbs up to the new daily challenges and believed they would lead to healthy changes.

Week 4 onward: Going from a prototype to a full app design

With renewed confidence and helpful user feedback, we spent several weeks building out a detailed design for the new Possible app. Our goal was to create a interesting, visually stunning app design that would inspire users and help them connect to Possible.

After multiple rounds of iteration and polishing, using the best practices from design and psychology, we knew that we had nailed our sprint goals.

Designing 7 days of challenges

Our biggest challenge with expanding the Possible app was actually creating the challenges.

Most apps use challenges to get users to repeat the same task. But here we wanted to use challenges to introduce seven fundamental concepts, which would introduce users to Possible’s philosophy, shift their mindset around diet, and bring small changes to their routine that would quickly lead to big impact. Each day would have a different activity, but they would all have to feel harmonious and unified.

Thinking through every aspect of the app

For the prototype, we had only designed core screens. So, along with building out the challenges, we also focused on thinking through all of the app’s secondary features, flows and details.

We did several rounds of iteration to create new elements like the Possible Points, community engagement, and superfoods store. We also focused on turning our earlier basic design into a highly polished design that was jam-packed with enjoyable colors, images and copy.

Here are some of the features and ideas we added while refining the app:

Building on the Possible brand

As we designed the app, we focused on building upon Possible’s branding. We took the existing color palette and incorporated it into backgrounds, icons and images to help unify different screens and help users track their progress through the app.

We also integrated images throughout the app, rather than the illustrations that were common in other fitness apps. It took us a while to find good Indian stock images that reflected Possible’s audience, but we knew it was worth the time. High-quality, relevant images bring more personality to the app and help users feel more connected.

Adding delightful microcopy

Fitness apps often use formal or brand copy, but we decided to go in a different direction. We created a unique microcopy for every screen, pop-up, and button, such as “High-5!” after completing the fifth challenge. We also added emojis 😄 for extra fun and brevity.

Boosting engagement through gamification and timely nudges

To help users stay motivated, we gamified the challenges by adding a points system. Doing activities helps users gain points and unlock new activities, while the progress bars and indicators help users track how far they’ve come and get excited about what’s ahead. We also added timely nudges to prompt users to take advantage of special offers on Possible’s expert consultations, superfoods, and other offers.

Building community through social proof, referrals, and friend activity

Even though each user would go through their challenges alone, we also wanted to make sure they felt like they were part of a larger community. We focused on integrating social proof, friend activity, and referrals throughout the app.

Looking back on the sprint

At the end of this project, Possible had found a new path forward for rebuilding their business. They emerged with a digital-first business model, clarity and certainty in their new direction, and a complete redesign for their app with a new challenges system and loads of community and gamification features.

Making major changes can be difficult for a business, but the Design Sprint’s rapid iterations paired with real user feedback helped all of us feel confident that we were on the right track.

👋🏽 Hey! Parallel is a Product Strategy & Design Studio based in Bangalore, India. We love using Design Sprints to create powerful digital products. Want to learn more? Check out more of our case studies or drop us a note on our website.