HelloSports
Facilitating a social fitness experience to drive engagement
I helped HelloSports design an MVP feature to launch its community tab and boost engagment.
HelloSports gamified fitness through a clever rewards system
HelloSports (HS) was a 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—with more then 32 different sports e-retailers and a $32 billion market valuation.
HelloSports main offering was a mobile app that would reward points to users based on physical activity, as tracked by their fitness trackers. These points could be traded for vouchers redeemable in SSU’s various online shops.
The Product Owner wanted to boost engagement and downloads
HelloSports’ Product Owner (PO) wanted to increase engagement and, secondarily, increase downloads. Users were considered engaged if they connected a fitness tracker and opened the app 1+ times a month. To achieve this, the PO wanted to implement community features and tasked me with researching, planning, and prototyping them.
I conducted an audit of competitors and summarized my findings
I started by conducting an audit of community and social features used in competitors’ apps. I then prepared a detailed report outlining the following findings:
1:1 interactions: Competitors frequently enabled users to interact with existing and non-users
Groups: Some competitors (Adidas Running, Strava, etc.) enable users to build groups
User profiles: These were ubiquitous among competitors with community/social features
Activity feed: A small percentage of larger competitors’ apps had activity feeds resembling social media apps
Unique features: Many included other features aimed at facilitating connection
We de-risked the idea with an MVP community feature
I presented my findings and a number of suggested solutions (see slides below) to the team. We decided to build one of these solutions, donate/Schenken, as an MVP feature that we would gradually build into a more robust community tab. Donate points would allow users to gift the points they had earned on HS through exercise to other HS users and would soon be expanded to allow users to invite friends not yet on HS by sending them points.
We also decided to anchor the community experience in a more robust user profile by improving the visual design and allowing users to upload a profile picture, which was not previously possible.
HelloSports shut its doors
Unfortunately, SSU, HelloSports' parent company, filed for insolvency in October 2023 and HelloSports was removed from both the Apple App and Google Play stores. I feel confident, however, that if we continued down the path we were on, we would have moved the needle on user engagement to a meaningful extent.
Go deeper
From the following presentation you can learn more about how I/we made design decisions on this project, try interactive prototypes of the solution, and see more examples of UI elements I developed for the HelloSports app.