tone

Tone is a workout-from-anywhere app that leverages the post-pandemic social atmosphere to provide a truly connected health & fitness experience to everybody.

Tone has something for everyone, from solo & instructor-led workouts, and guided mindfulness & meditation sessions to full-picture health tracking and community sports events.

For this project, I was responsible for executing all discovery, research, ideation, UI/UX, branding, and creative processes

The solution should be designed as a mobile app, and integrate social capabilities without compromising quality of health data - all while maintaining a contemporary, motivational, and friendly tone of voice

The health & fitness market is flooded with apps that largely do the same thing - provide workout instructions in one form or another, and track workout progress. 

The problem lies with the approach to the user’s motivation. Most health & fitness apps lack in keeping users engaged and motivated to work towards their goals, resulting in drastic drops in user engagement after 1-2 weeks, and ultimately failing to achieve their main goal

Tone focuses on an often overlooked factor to keep users motivated - accountability.

By integrating social capabilities, social sharing, a bespoke messaging system, and showcasing community events, tone encourages users to interact with their community and share their progress with their surroundings. Users that share their progress with others are more likely to stick to their goals over a longer period of time

The project’s brief concerns an age-old problem around users’ motivation to pursue and maintain motivation to pursue a healthy lifestyle, work out and get more physically fit. Luckily for me, this age-old problem has exhaustive research surrounding the subject which allowed me to read into the reasonings for people’s loss of motivation over time.

After digging deep into 4 different research papers & case studies surrounding the motivations of the pursuit of health & fitness, I found that there are some common misconceptions about the motivations for working out. 

Contrary to popular belief, the motivation to become more fit does not come from an intrinsic desire to be healthier, rather it tends to come from a place of wanting to develop a new skill, a feeling of accomplishment, social status,  and other behavioral & social motivations, not inherent to health.

Another major finding from my secondary research involves tackling a major hurdle in getting people to exercise, the initial spark.

Across four studies with 279 adults, researchers found that participants significantly underestimate how much they would enjoy exercise, or, simply put - affective forecasting bias. 

Getting past that initial workout and the ability to achieve and display new skills to others is crucial for maintaining one’s motivation for working out.

Discovering some more about what motivates people to work out allowed me to meaningfully think of ways to help users consistently engage in working out.

I started out by studying some of the other health & fitness apps that are dominating the market - examining what works, and what doesn’t.

I concluded that most current workout apps lack in allowing users to engage with their friends, family, and community, which can be critical for one’s consistent motivation, as mentioned before - accountability and display of achievements are key factors in motivation.

After examining existing products and finding the areas they lack, I drafted some user flows with 2 main focuses - maintaining a familiar, high-quality, accurate fitness app user experience, and injecting personal & social aspects into the product.

Having user flows drafted, the next step was to visualize what those flows might look and feel like. I sketched some rough drafts of what would later become a low-fidelity wireframe. This allowed me to see what the user flow looks like and make sure design elements are placed in the right places to make the user flow make the most sense.

Next, I further solidified the structure of the interface by developing low-fidelity wireframes which would later help test the integrity of the interface layout and flow.

After developing a low-fidelity wireframe, it was crucial for me to test my design choices concerning layout and flow. I gathered a small group of 5 participants who largely match the target audience of the final product and asked them to complete some basic tasks and share their thoughts. These were some of their comments:

These comments helped validate some design assumptions and challenge others. The next step was to take their feedback and inject it into the high-fidelity designs.

Even after testing once and designing high-fidelity wireframes, it was important to test those changes and make sure that the feedback from the first round of testing was properly applied, and that any design quirks are pointed out and challenged.

Even in a UI/UX project, it’s important to apply a brand vision which speaks to the product and compliments what the product is all about.

Tone is contemporary, motivational, friendly, energetic, and accurate.

This is reflected in the modern typography, bold colors, and the modular, connected nature of the layout and design of the product.

Over the past 2 months, I engaged in the challenge of trying to rethink the solution to an age-old problem which, frankly, was an intimidating task.

While I believe that my suggested solution is far from an original solution, I believe that it hasn’t been properly implemented by the leaders of the health & fitness industry.

Though I felt intimidated at first, I was determined to implement a social solution to the motivation fall-off problem in a way that feels familiar, and organic to the product - not forced.

I believe that the implementation of the solution was successful. With features like community events, bespoke direct messaging, and full-image health metrics - the product proved to be an energetic, accurate, social product that feels familiar and organic.

I genuinely enjoyed the research process, where gained a lot of insight on the problem at hand, and it helped me make design decisions much more confidently and successfully, which was a gratifying feeling of accomplishment.

Overall, the process was insightful and challenging, and therefore a rewarding success.

While the design was tested and proved to be successful, it is not complete yet. 

In the near future, the prototype will be developed into a complete app experience, and the brand will be further solidified and validated.