MyFitnessPal Plans:

Providing an alternative besides food tracking to help people reach their health & fitness goals.

While the team wanted to focus on making food tracking easier, I proposed diversifying our product offering to provide a different way to engage those users besides food tracking. After all, users who left did so because they didn’t want to track food or felt that it didn’t work for them.

Since 78% of our user base identify themselves as beginners looking for guidance to reach their health & fitness goals, I proposed offering a Plans feature to help create a path for those users.

Instead of letting users trial and error to figure out what they need to do to achieve their goals, Plans take the guesswork out, provide structure, education, and support that users need to get started. The daily tasks help pace the user through change, directing them to take the right actions towards their goals.

For our beginner users who can benefit from tackling broader habit changes rather than obsessing about the minutia of their nutrition, the plans feature provides a simpler, more approachable manner to getting healthier.

BACKGROUND

While our sign up rates are high, new user retention is very low – only 36% of new users return on day 3.

Our research surfaced these top reasons as to why new users leave the app:

• “Not interested in food tracking.”

• “Food tracking is too tedious.”

• “I don’t know what to do.”

• “This isn’t working for me.”

This project was a personal project to find a more effective way to improve new user retention besides simplifying logging. I pitched it to several product owners and stakeholders where it gained traction and became an official initiative and launched as a feature in the app.

THE VISION OF PLANS

A plan for every goal, level, lifestyle.

The Plans feature hopes to provide a library of content to serve our diverse user base, meeting them at their expertise level and supporting a variety of health & fitness goals.

Through Plans, we hoped to:

• Help guide users towards the right actions to achieve their goals.

• Empower and enable our users to succeed through the provision of resources and education.

• Take users to the next level by inspiring them with new goals through plans.

• Support the Under Armour brand by building brand love through high quality content from trusted elite coaches and beloved athletes.

GOALS OF THE FEATURE

1. Get users started, keep them going.
   Users download our app because they are ready to take action. However, it is easy to be overwhelmed and confused by conflicting information and experience decision paralysis, bouncing around from solution to solution before results can be achieved. We need to get them started, and keep the momentum going so they can get to visible results.

2. Make health and nutrition more accessible & approachable.
   Provide clarity on what to do and give user a clear direction, regardless of expertise level. Instead of focusing on the minutia of counting calories and macros, let’s focus on helping users choose better food and lifestyle choices.

3. Help users see the value of food tracking (and the value of the product).

   Tracking food is tedious and unnatural. A tool is only useful is the user knows how to use it. Unfortunately, the value of MFP is often lost due to our users’ lack of knowledge. We need to teach users not only the value of food tracking, but how to use the data that MFP provides to make informed changes.

TYPES OF PLANS

Plans was envisioned to serve users with content to get them started, engaged, and lead them on to the next level for continued engagement beyond nutrition tracking.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS

Plans provide a user with structure, simplifying the process of change into smaller steps.

Change is overwhelming and people tend to bite off more than they can chew. The goal of the task list is to provide focus and direction while allowing the user to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Users on a plan will get daily tasks to complete, ranging from real world actions to. reflective prompts, or unlocking new educational material when they’re ready for it. The days build upon prior concepts and increase in difficulty to help users make progress and develop habits.

Coaching users and leading them to see the value of tracking food through different learning modalities.

Everyone has different learning preferences. To keep things interesting and engaging, plans tasks contain varied activities, ranging from articles, short videos, interactive quizzes, and reflective prompts.

Inspired by our successful users, the plan activities seek to lead users to self-awareness and light bulb moments with regards to their diet and lifestyle choices. Since new users often don’t realize what to look out for in their data, plans help to lead users to these moments of awareness through prompts of reflections, reality checks, and challenging their assumptions. The tasks guide users to different aspects of the app to show them the functionality and how to use the data, thereby educating the user on the value of the product.

Plans enable and empower users with kick-start guides and cheat sheets.

For our users who don’t know where to start, the Plans feature seeks to deliver helpful resources that educate and point them in the right direction.

Pantry lists provide tangible starting points while educational articles empower users with knowledge.

A plan that responds to user behavior to correct, support and reinforce behaviors.

While majority of our competition were focused on delivery content like meal plans and workout plans, we wanted to go beyond that. The market is already saturated with content and interviews indicated that many found them hard to follow due to the rigidity of the plans. We wanted something that responded to the user accordingly and was malleable to their lifestyle and preferences.

The content and structure of plans sought to mimic the behavioral modification feedback loop to help engage and retain users.

Charting out a growth plan that is flexible to different individuals:

Gated progression ensured users only progressed when they were successful with the current modules to prevent users from progressing to harder behaviors and concepts they weren’t ready for. (see diagram below). Concepts on the same difficulty level provided linear progress that allowed users to try something else while they were stuck.

Making plans unique and personalized to users.

Modular topics and end of week prompts allowed users to craft their own program based on their interests and struggles. This format also allowed us to add modules in response to user’s struggles that we gathered at the end of each week and provide the support that they needed at the right time, thereby making plans feel personal and relevant.

THE PROCESS OF TAKING A CONCEPT FEATURE TO MVP RELEASE

While this project started off as a personal initiative, the entire company brought it to life. Many different roles ranging from product, customer happiness, nutrition science, user research, data science, backend engineers, frontend engineers and content creators were involved. Because of how complex this feature is, we needed to figure out how to release a small version to proof the feature out.

The process:

Together with the team, we narrowed the scope of the feature for MVP release by:

• leaning on data science and devs to identify feasibility of different aspects to start.

• identifying essential elements of the feature for MVP (Must haves vs nice to have vs bells and whistles)

• mapping out features based on impact vs feasibility to help with prioritization

• Breaking up features into release phases.

• Identified what plans to release based on user survey interest and complexity of content generation. Leveraging existing content from the MyFitnessPal blog for the first batch of plans bought us time while the content team generated new content.

Setting ourselves up for success for future iterations:

• Having a full vision of what the feature was kept the team engaged about the potential and impact of our work. It also created a roadmap that kept improvements lined up.

• Releasing milestones to beta users for feedback, even when the feature had no content. This allowed us to regularly measure interest for the feature, generate excitement, and course correct if needed.

• Recognizing the shortcomings of the MVP due to the scaled down nature of the feature allowed us to explain shortcomings in performance and prevent the project from shutting down due to low numbers.

PILOT OUTCOMES

Overall, we’ve confirmed that there’s a demand and interest in a plans/coaching offering and that it was a feature that users were most willing to pay for. The failures of the pilot showed us that content needed to be engaging and personalized, offering users with specific feedback on their data, rather than just generic education.

While there’s interest in further developing this feature, we’ve learnt that the company and its data is not fully equipped to support the full vision at the moment. Further iterations were put on hold while we lay the groundwork and invest in the resources and infrastructure for the next round.

Impact from Plans feature:

• Total sign ups: 294, 616 users.

• Number of plans to date: 20 plans

• Overall user retention of users that started a plan: +28% on iOS, +76% on Android**

• New user retention of users that started a plan: +54% on iOS, +87% on Android**

• Premium trial start conversion rates increased: +16% on iOS, +18% on Android

• Based on revenue generated from the pilot, projected revenue of $2M from Plans feature alone.

• Plans feature leveraged as the annual engagement program for New Year’s Rush.

• The launch of new plans is used to boost Premium conversion seasonally.

**Android faced higher success than iOS because of increased discoverability of feature due to its placement as a main nav bar item.