ACTIV & ProTrainer Apps
“Can I have pizza on this diet – or do I have to just eat chicken and broccoli everyday??”
Goal Answer:
“Yes, here’s how”
The ACTIV ProTrainer & Client apps are a set of connected apps to create, distribute and follow user-personalized nutrition plans.
Unlike other tracking nutrition platforms, ACTIV provides guidance and choices for the user to browse, make and fine-tune that are personalized to the user to fit their plan – and provided by fitness and nutrition professionals.
Initial Research
In-Person Studies
Opting to go for a first principles approach to initial product development, we built relationships with 12 personal trainers, crossfit instructors, nutritionists and dietitians interviewed them and 36 of their clients. After 6-8 weeks of shadowing, surveys and interviews, we identified behaviors and needs that became some of our core MVP features:
Personalized Guidance
Meal Options (Not a dictated meal plan)
Simple good/bad clarity on choices
Identification of WHY a meal is a bad choice
Restaurants/Real World food
Simple, but accurate – can’t be vague
Meal Tracking
Convenience, convenience, convenience
Macronutrients & calories
Real Food Items
Save foods/ingredients used often for quick access
Remove/reject specific unliked/bad foods
Community
Share/save meals I like
Social/group accountability
Feature Research
Competitive Analysis
Once we had an idea of what core features might be, we began thoroughly evaluating the competitive app landscape to identify crossover, best-in-class feature solutions, accepted pricing models, and solidify our value proposition to both future investors and customers.
In order to get a range of quantitative and qualitative data, we collected app review data and utilized a combination of other methods including:
On-device user testing
In-person surveys/diary studies
Online paid surveys
Product Philosophy
Establishing Brand & Design Pillars
We had a better idea of what doesn’t work and why, but we needed some guiding principles to keep us from making the common mistakes most of the other platforms fall back on out of ease for the product team. I wrote our design pillars from the user’s perspective to remind us to empathize and ask – will this feature/design/information help you?
“Just Tell me what i can eat”
If we were health/fitness professionals, we wouldn’t need your help. We don’t need to understand gluconeogenesis, and I don’t know how to remove 32g of carbs from a meal.. just tell me what I can eat.
Mirror REal Life
Trainers can’t rely on expecting us to make drastic life altering schedule/habit changes. We have jobs, families, hobbies – plans and meals have to realistically fit within our daily lives.
Introduce Options, not limits
If weight loss were easy, I’d have already done it on my own. Don’t tell me what I can’t do anymore – give me so many exciting options that I’m motivated to keep trying new things – AND REACH MY GOALS!
Design & Iteration
User Stories & Wireframes
Building a set of apps that worked together was more complex of a task than I’m usually faced with so I opted to develop user stories and map the stories to low fidelity wireframes in similar strides – using user stories to define the goals and functionality of each interaction, then mapping the interaction to a wireframe/flow.
Interactive Prototypes
For core interactions like plan setup, meal modification and recording, I built lightly interactive prototypes in InVision to run small usability studies to test and simplify interaction-heavy features.
MVP Features
Key features we developed in our MVP release of the ACTIV platform.
Create Meal Plans
ProTrainers – Create, assign, modify & update plans
We quickly discovered, regardless of goal, starting weight, body composition or type of health professional providing the plan – most meal plans are made of the same parameters:
Intake a specific range of calories and/or macronutrients
Exclude the intake of certain foods
Eat within specific intervals or time windows
Check-in on regular intervals with trainer to check progress and adjust plan
Optional: Trainers could also add daily notes and assign specific meals for specific meal times in a day
Contextual Tracking & Feedback
Providing feedback in real time
Calories are not created equal and many nutrition plans are based on the proper balancing of protein, carbs and fat. It was important to not just inform users if a meal was good or bad, but to help them begin to learn why – people cannot learn to make better choices if they can’t identify what makes it a good or bad choice
Hundreds of Dynamic Meals, Personally Scored for Each Individual User
Instagram-style meal feed, with personalized scores to make a good choice the easy choice
Here is where we lived our core philosophy of “Just show me what I can eat” – each time our ACTIV client users opened the app, they were greeted with tasty looking meals created by their trainer, other users and curated by our staff (it was mostly us to start)
The best part – each meal could be easily saved for later – recorded and modified and was given a score based on the viewing user’s meal plan and remaining macronutrient needs for the day.
Smart Dining Made Easy
Make good selections when you can’t eat at home – or don’t want to
One of our most beloved features allows users to search, score, add and modify (this was a huge deal, no one else did this) over 150,000 meals from 30,000 large chain to local restaurants.
This feature was key to our success as it actually empowered users to explore and modify food items at restaurants to turn bad meals into healthy ones they could eat everyday!
Results & Impact
Impact Of Relying on 3rd Party Tech
Just before launching the Client & Trainer apps (literally 3 days) – Apple changed the App Store terms of service allowing it to reject any app making in-app purchases/subscriptions without using the Apple pay system (and also paying 33% of revenue to Apple) – It took 4 weeks to remove the paid signup/upgrade flow from the app and alter our business model.
We didn’t plan well enough for iteration and refactoring features
Pressed for time and running out of runway from our seed funding, we struggled to improve on any feature that wasn’t mission critical or wasn’t intended to be replaced by a more robust feature within the next 3-6 months.
“Fitness People” Don’t Eat Real Food
We had thought with a few hundred users on the platform adding the meals they eat, we would quickly have a vast library of delicious looking options to serve our expanding user base. No. That didn’t happen. Instead our users flooded the feed with wrinkled protein bars and branded protein shake bottles – our staff ate delicious looking meals daily and began filling the feed ourselves.
< View the full ACTIV Case Study