HelloSports was an intrapreneurial venture started by SIGNA Sports United (SSU), a publicly traded sports e-retailer and subsidiary of SIGNA AG, one of Europe’s largest real estate investment firms. Their main offering was a mobile app with which users could sync their fitness trackers and be rewarded points for exercising. These points could be traded for vouchers that were redeemable in SSU’s various online shops.
Unfortunately, SSU filed for insolvency in October 2023 and HelloSports was removed from both the Apple App and Google Play stores.
Goals
HelloSports attempted to gamify fitness through objectives, progress indicators/levels, rewards, challenges, and, increasingly, social interactions, in the hope that this would get people out of their seats and into the streets. This would not only help users find a fitness routine they could stick to, but also convert users to paying customers through the vouchers rewarded to them. Redeeming vouchers, however, was one of the last steps in a lengthier chain of interactions and could not be reached without first overcoming a number of other potentially burdensome interactions.
With this in mind, we focused on two high-level goals:
1. Increase conversions
Gradually reducing friction in each phase of the user activity chain until high percentages were converting into paying SSU customers
2. Increase downloads
Lowering the barriers for users discovering the app organically and making it easier for existing users to invite their friends to HelloSports.
Project environment
The team at HelloSports was small, and consisted of New Business Manager, Kishen Patel, Product Owner, Ulf Stahrenberg, Freelance Performance Marketer, Katharina Maria Schneider, and me. The development was outsourced to a team in Spain, with whom I collaborated infrequently. The New Business Manager acted as a project manager for both product and marketing efforts; I produced all of the deliverables for product and marketing; marketing and product were siloed. HelloSports outsourced most of its branding and visual design to agency called Cobe.
Software
My role
As the sole designer on the team, I was responsible for all user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and marketing design. I worked closely with veteran Product Owner, Ulf Stahrenberg, to gather insights and build new features in the HelloSports app and freelance Performance Marketer, Katharina Maria Schneider, to produce all marketing assets, static and video. Kishen Patel, Manager of New Business at the time, acted as Project Manager for product and marketing and as a sounding board when I had ideas and/or questions.
My tasks:
• Ideation
• Competitor research
• User interaction flows
• Prototyping (low and high fidelity)
• Motion and interaction
• Competitor research
• User interaction flows
• Prototyping (low and high fidelity)
• Motion and interaction
Design process
I believe strongly that user experience design requires user input, so I always try to root the design process in a mutual understanding—among the team—of users' pain points, needs, and wants. It can also be helpful to learn from competitors to avoid reinventing the wheel.
HelloSports' product owner, Ulf, handled user research, usability testing, and quality assurance, while I conducted competitor research to identify trends and opportunities. We then met at SSU's offices to summarize findings and brainstorm solutions. The design process from start to finish looked like this:
Research
As mentioned previously, Ulf conducted all user research, interviews and usability testing independently of me and just shared his insights in our ideation sessions. In parallel, I conducted competitor research in hopes of uncovering opportunities for chipping away at our goals. Specifically, I wanted to know the following:
• How were competitors activating users?
• How were competitors converting users into paying customers?
• Were competitors using any patterns that we had not considered that might be helpful for us?
• How were competitors converting users into paying customers?
• Were competitors using any patterns that we had not considered that might be helpful for us?
The competition
For my competitor research, I explored nine prominent fitness apps:
Definition
Through Ulf's user research and my competitor analysis, we uncovered several relevant insights:
1. Social/community features are essential
A majority of participants in Ulf's research expressed a preference for exercising with friends and all of the apps I looked at included at least a few ways to interact with other users. Many of the most successful competitors invested heavily in community and in many ways resembled social media apps.
2. Competition is a powerful motivator
Many of the participants in Ulf's user research found friendly competition to be a powerful motivator when it comes to exercising. Many of the apps, particularly the larger players in this space, include features to facilitate this.
Big and medium sized fit-tech companies actively promote the community and social features of their products.
Additional research
I decided to dive deeper on the topics of exercising with friends and community-based fitness and uncovered a number of insights. Chief among them is the fact that humans have an innate need for connection and belonging, and that participating in group fitness or working out with friends may satisfy that for many. In a Les Mills survey of 12,000 people, 46% of respondents who regularly exercise said they take part in exercises classes, while 59% gym members surveyed take part in fitness classes. One gym owner was quoted as doing everything in her power to encourage social connections within her gyms because of the outsized impact it has on membership.
One researcher and exercise physiologist, Matthew Stultz, Phd, points to a phenomenon called social facilitation—the tendency for the presence of others to improve an individual's performance of a task—as an explanation for why fitness with friends works. Jamie Shapiro, a professor of sport and performance psychology at Denver University, points to Self Determination Theory (SDT) and our intrinsic need for relatedness as an explanation for why exercising with friends can be so motivating.
I made this after working with HelloSports, but this is roughly how I would have structured the problem space during the ideation stage.
Solutions
Our research showed that community and social features strongly incentivized users to become and remain active, but how to leverage this knowledge was less clear. While further validation would have been helpful, Ulf felt confident, based on his experience, that investing in such features would very likely impact our goals, engaging users, attracting new ones, and boosting conversions.
Our research showed that community and social features strongly incentivized users to become and remain active, but how to leverage this knowledge was less clear. While further validation would have been helpful, Ulf felt confident, based on his experience, that investing in such features would very likely impact our goals, engaging users, attracting new ones, and boosting conversions.
We recognized that creating a content feed would be a massive effort and might take years to yield results. Thus, we opted for a more gradual approach with an MVP feature: Donate points and invite friends. This feature, "Spenden," would have its own page and be prominently featured in the app's main navigation. As it grew, it would eventually evolve into the "Community" tab.
Donate points
We decided that enabling HelloSports users to engage with existing contacts on the app was an essential interaction for fostering community and social interaction in the app. To do this, we would allow users to send points to one another as a means of strengthening social ties and encouraging a joint fitness experience. We eventually expanded this feature to allow users to invite external contacts to the app.
User flows
Ulf put together a user story for the donate points and invite friends features, which I used to create user flows.
Donate points to existing HelloSports users
A note on wireframes... and the lack thereof
Though wireframes certainly have their place in UI design, programs like Figma have made it very easy to configure component libraries and easily update them across all prototypes, making it very easy to wireframe using fully- or almost fully-formed components. This is typically how I wireframe, hence the lack of wireframes in my projects.
User interface
Donor
To donate points, the donor taps the search bar labeled "Name oder Email Adresse," types the recipient's name or email, selects from the results, and enters the points to donate. After adjusting the amount using the increase/decrease buttons, the donor taps "Jetzt schenken" to confirm.
To donate points, the donor taps the search bar labeled "Name oder Email Adresse," types the recipient's name or email, selects from the results, and enters the points to donate. After adjusting the amount using the increase/decrease buttons, the donor taps "Jetzt schenken" to confirm.
Recipient
The recipient gets an email notification about the gifted points. When they next open the app, a modal summarizes the donation and offers options to accept or reject it. If accepted, the points are added to their account, and a "Danke" is sent to the donor via a snackbar. If rejected, the points are returned to the donor, who is notified.
The recipient gets an email notification about the gifted points. When they next open the app, a modal summarizes the donation and offers options to accept or reject it. If accepted, the points are added to their account, and a "Danke" is sent to the donor via a snackbar. If rejected, the points are returned to the donor, who is notified.
Inviting external contacts
Several months after launching the donate points feature, we expanded it to increase downloads by allowing users to invite external contacts to join HelloSports by donating points to them. The flow was similar but included extra steps to facilitate the invitation and help new users get started.
User flows
Ulf put together a user story for the donate points and invite friends features, which I used to create user flows.
User interface
Donor
Upon navigating to the Schenken tab, users see content blocks explaining the point donation/invitation feature. Donors can type the recipient's name or choose to invite an external contact by clicking "Mit Punkten einladen" ("Invite with points"). They enter the external contact's email, select the number of points to send, and confirm or cancel the transaction. If the recipient creates an account, the donor receives fifty points.
Upon navigating to the Schenken tab, users see content blocks explaining the point donation/invitation feature. Donors can type the recipient's name or choose to invite an external contact by clicking "Mit Punkten einladen" ("Invite with points"). They enter the external contact's email, select the number of points to send, and confirm or cancel the transaction. If the recipient creates an account, the donor receives fifty points.
Recipient
The recipient gets an email explaining the transaction, introducing HelloSports, and guiding them on claiming the points. After downloading the app and completing onboarding, they see a login/sign-up page with a "Du bist eingeladen worden?" ("Did you receive an invite?") link. This triggers an action sheet explaining they need to sign up with the email used for the invitation. The donor receives fifty points once the recipient signs up. The recipient can then see the transaction in the app and choose to accept or reject the donation, with the donor being notified of their decision.
The recipient gets an email explaining the transaction, introducing HelloSports, and guiding them on claiming the points. After downloading the app and completing onboarding, they see a login/sign-up page with a "Du bist eingeladen worden?" ("Did you receive an invite?") link. This triggers an action sheet explaining they need to sign up with the email used for the invitation. The donor receives fifty points once the recipient signs up. The recipient can then see the transaction in the app and choose to accept or reject the donation, with the donor being notified of their decision.
User profile
The smallest unit of a community is a single individual; on an app, an individual is reduced to their profile and public interactions. We determined that it was, therefore, it was important to give users a way to put their best foot forward with a more robust profile page than what existed on HelloSports previously.
We expanded the page to allow users to upload profile pictures so they could identify one another and form connections more easily, and included the user's rank and progress indicator to encourage competition and incentivize use of HelloSports.
User flow
User interface
Validation
These features were smaller steps in a broader plan to foster community in HelloSports—thereby driving up engagement, conversions, and downloads—and would have required additional iteration to deliver value meaningfully to users and HelloSports as a company.
At a minimum, I believe it would have been helpful to attach target metrics to the broader goals we had identified, so that we could determine whether or not we were making progress. Tracking the number of points being donated, the number of new members resulting from donations, and the number of donated points being converted would have helped us a great deal in deciding how to further shape these features and assessing what other opportunities to pursue.
Other UI Elements
Additional icons and illustrations I created for use across the HelloSports app and marketing materials. Amongst these are a set of icons representing various trackable experiences in HelloSports, two illustrations corresponding to tennis and yoga challenges on HelloSports, and three illustrations for the HelloSports's onboarding screens.
I created 2/6 illustrations representing tennis and yoga challenges on HelloSports.
Marketing Design
I worked closely with a Performance Marketing Freelancer to create a huge swath of digital marketing collateral, including, but not limited to, newsletters, static social media posts, and, occasionally, animations. Here is a small selection:
International Tennis Federation
The HelloSports team wanted to approach the International Tennis Federation (ITF) with a bid to design an app for their global ranking system, the ITF World Tennis Number™. I worked closely with HelloSports' Product Owner and its Manager of New Business to build several screens for the app, which the team presented to the ITF.
