A Guide to Fitness Tracking App UI & UX

The health-tech market is flooded with thousands of fitness tracking apps, meaning an app has to be extraordinary in order to beat the competition. It is crucial to know that one of every five users abandon an app after their first use, and a poor app design is the most common reason behind such user behaviour.

There are several factors that make a fitness tracking app extraordinary, and one such is the fitness app design. Here are some of the fitness tracking app UI/UX components that need to be taken care of while designing the app.

Fitness Tracking App UI Design

Well, not all the fitness apps will have the same user journey. Still, there are some screens that are common, while some other screens will be there to serve specific purposes.  Following are the most important and common design elements that need to be considered while designing the fitness tracking app:

Home Screen

Most famous fitness apps home screens contain simple charts that showcase the progress through the user’s training and nutrition plans. The fitness app home page design should be in a manner that contains the user’s recent activities and their progress through their fitness goals.

It becomes too risky to make changes on the home screen when the application is already live and has millions of registered users, because even a small change in the content formation can ruin the user experience.

Home screen’s functionality and elements depend on the app’s primary usage. It is tricky to design the home screen, especially when the app has many primary functions.

Onboarding Screens

Almost every fitness tracking app requires user registration and the most common methods are via a Google account or Facebook. Usually, any other ordinary mobile app would require the user’s mobile number, email address, name, gender, age, and demographics. But fitness tracking apps need more than just the user’s biography.

While it is essential for the fitness tracking app to have detailed user data, apps are likely to lose some potential users during this data gathering process. There is a  chance that users will abandon the app if the onboarding functionality is presented as static information. The onboarding process should guide the user through each step of the onboarding process. It keeping the user motivated enough to fill in the required information.

There should also be an option for users to skip the onboarding process, and explore the app first. This option mitigates the risk of app abandonment during the onboarding process.

Activity Tracking Screen

Fitness tracking apps use a variety of data to provide the user with valuable insights. Such applications are supposed to have separate screens dedicated to the user’s activity. For example, there should be separate screens focusing on the user’s heart rate and running sessions. Especially, when the charts shown in the app screens have a variety of data types such as duration, distance, pace, calories, heart rate, etc.

Fitness Plans Screens

This is where most of the fitness tracking solution providers make money from. The apps include a variety of plans the user can pick and follow. The service providers use various types of content such as short videos, pictures, gifs to showcase the plans.

While some plans are free, others come with a price tag. The paid ones are more personalized as they include a  workout generator. This generator creates a customized workout plan based on the user’s fitness level, desired duration, props choice, and so on.

Animations

Animations are a great help for illustrating exercise steps to the users. The app designers can also make use of gifs to make this more interesting for the end-user. It is observed that animated elements and charts make the app more interactive to the users, which results in the end-user is more likely to use the app often.

Fitness Tracking App UX Design

The fitness tracking app user experience (UX) is what makes the app features comprehendible and easier to use. If the mobile application requires too many actions from the user to get desired information, it ruins the user experience. In a similar fashion, when the button size is not appropriate for finger touch or responsive, it makes it hard for the users to use the application.

One of the biggest challenges occurs when a fitness training app is developed for both iOS and Android platforms. It is to be considered that both the applications shouldn’t look too different. Although there will be some navigation differences, as both the platforms are very different in functionality.

Following are the some of the fitness tracking app UX considerations:

Navigation

The focus should be on making the app easy to navigate. Unnoticeable buttons and cluttered screens are certainly a dead-end for the application. For example, if there are more than three buttons on a tab bar, it becomes too complicated to navigate.

It is preferred to provide input masks to users for filling out forms. The forms can also have a smart auto-fill feature. Some accessibility features can also be configured. For example, the keyboard shall be programmed to automatically be customized to turn into a number pad if the user is supposed to enter numeric information.

Notifications

Push notifications are very helpful to remind users of their fitness goals, and motivate them to keep consistently using their fitness program. While too many notifications may freak the user out resulting in abandoning the app, too little notifications mean the user might forget that the app even exists on their phone. The app creator needs to find a perfect balance here.

One way to optimize the use of push notifications is to empower the user to personalize their notifications. The fitness tracking app can have a notification setting functionality, where the user can turn on and off any type of notifications. Some apps such as Strava,  use friends activities reminders to motivate the user. But it doesn’t mean that every user would want to receive such notifications, and this is where a notification personalization feature will be handy.

Data Usage Transparency

While asking the user’s permission, It is important to provide the user with a clear indication of why the data is needed. Data privacy is a big concern in 2020, and the users want their data to be handled with care.

Fitness App Design Update

While it is important to update the app design once a while to make the app look modern and useful in the ever-changing environment, the designs should be according to the user reviews and research. In the past, we’ve seen many app design updates that made it painful for the users to adapt to the changes. One such example is Twitter. It made a small change of changing the star icon (favourite icon) to a heart icon. It was a very bad design change decision for twitter as it ruined the user experience.

Premium Membership and In-App Purchases

It is tricky to promote premium membership to the users that are already enjoying free services because they might abandon the app if they are pushed too much for paid services. For example, a health and nutrition app Lifesum shows food ratings for meals without any paid membership, but they ask users to get a paid subscription to know deep insights about those ratings.

You won’t want to irritate users by constantly notifying them about paid subscriptions. Instead, you shall sell the paid membership in accordance to the user’s actions. For example, you can send sales-oriented notifications when the user has completed his basic training plan.

Wrapping Up

To begin with, the first milestone for the application would be to build a buyer persona and an empathy map. There must be a clear understanding of the target audience and the key pain points that the app is supposed to solve.

If you have a fitness tracking app idea and you are looking for a mobile app development company specialized in the health tech domain, reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help you as we are the ideal digital partner to enable the achievement of your vision.