JOINA
Exploring Community Lead Challenges
Client
JOINA IO
Team
5 UX Designers
My Role
UX Researcher
UI Designer
Project Span
October - December
8 Weeks
Summary of The Project
Joina is a health and workout app, which focuses on creating exercise habits by having challenges to finish every day. The app had a longstanding problem with making the users pay for their monthly subscription and wanted help researching their user base to understand their wants and needs to improve their conversion rates.
Our solution was to make betterment to the option to make your own challenges, which already existed in the app. Creating a better system of choosing exercises, schedule time and the possibility of making private challenges for friends.
The Challenge
Joina wanted to further their understanding of how their users engaged with other users in the app and where they could improve the social aspects for their users, in turn making the app more rewarding to use.
“We have this amazing community and we’re not taking advantage of it”
— Leonie, CEO of Joina
Process
Research
Concepts
Final Product
User Flows
Results
Iterations
Personal Learnings
1
5
2
6
3
7
4
1
Research
Survey
I did an initial survey to get a gauge how people interacted with training apps like Joina, as well as how they interacted with other people when working out.
With our surveys we reached over 30 respondents, with both Joina users and outsiders.
53% used some form of workout app
Women were 2X
as likely to use workout apps
People prefer working out with other people
100% wanted to create their own challenge
Interviews
I conducted interviews to get a more in depth description of their views of the app, and how people interact with eachother when working out.
In total we did:
Interviews in Totalt
3
8
All the Joina users really appreciated the community and motivation from that came with using the app
With Joina Users
3
With Non- Users
There were an even split of people who get motivation from working out alone and working out with someone, but they were all open to meeting new people when working out.
2
With Experts
All the Joina users really appreciated the community and motivation from that came with using the app
“Yeah, absolutely. [Ability to create your own community weight challenges] is something I’ve missed. You can create a challenge and work on what you want to improve”
“I think most people join Joina because they want to do something themselves and they also need the [encourangement], and a lot of people perhaps don’t have it at home, so I think it’s always someone who is responding”
2
Sacrifical Concepts
The ideas that came up from the participants during our interviews were made into simple sacrificial concepts. These were then shown to the other interviewees to get their feedback. Here I was an active participant in creating and generating ideas for it.
The one getting the most popular feedback was Create your own challenge, here as well!
Create Private Challenges
Community Tab
Live Chat
3
User Flow
After the completion of the interviews, we started creating the user flow for Creating Your Own Challenge, which received the most positive feedback from both the users and Joina.
4
Iterations
One of the most important aspects of our iterations was the user testing. In total we ran over 15 user tests. However, the biggest challenge was getting in contact with Joina users to do the user tests on. So as an emergency solution we ran the user test over a range of non-users.
In total we did a total of over 80 screens after all the user testing was completed.
5
Final Results
The final solution became a Create Your Own Challenge with other users in the app. This would enable the users to foster community and relationships within the app, as well as having more freedom to get the exercises they want without waiting for a specific challenge to be held.
Joina’s Implementation
In March of 2024, Joina implemented our design into their app! I’m so excited to see the community’s reaction to it!
6
Final Results
Joina was very satisfied with both the research we gathered and the features we created. They were happy to know they were on the right track with their company and started taking the steps to implement it into their app.
7
Personal Learnings
This was my first ever experience with a client when working with UX-design and all in all it has been an eye opening experience. First of all, the size of the team was excellent when it came to the research part, however it was much harder to distribute tasks when it came to the UI-process.
Another thing I learned was to never take ideas for granted and be conscious of biases. As we did the sacrificial concepts during the interview phase, the ideas I thought would be the one to get the best reaction were the ones no one actually liked. This gave me a wake up call and made me rethink the priorities of the users and for people who regularly use an app to help with their workouts.