Ongo: The Run Experience

Improving content discoverability and program customization

Qualitative insights

Creator stakeholder interviews
Weekly in-person or virtual meetings with creator customer to understand what features were needed to better manage app and user community.
Support tickets and user surveys
Reviewing and tracking support issues and conversations to synthesize feedback and areas of opportunity.
User behavior analytics of event tracking to understand effectiveness of onboarding, content search & filtering and other user metrics.

Brief: Redesign Ongo’s onboarding and home feed experience to deliver personalized content recommendations to users that support their running goals

Total project time: 7 weeks

My role: UX research lead, UX/UI designer, growth strategist

Results

Product-market fit: 52% (up from 38%) of users said they would feel very disappointed if they could no longer use the TRE app
Conversion to premium: Increased conversion to paid subscription from 3.6% to 3.9% after 7-day trial

Problem Statement

The Ongo platform gives health and wellness creators, like The Run Experience (TRE), the ability to publish their own native iOS and Android apps, manage membership-based communities and generate subscription revenue.

While TRE’s iOS running community was growing quickly, user surveys and customer feedback revealed the following:

Users were struggling to find all relevant content in the TRE library and others didn’t know where to start or what program to try next.
A percentage of new users were abandoning the app before completing sign-up, never landing in the app to see test its value

Quantitative insights

First session completion: Users who complete first workout session are 4.7x more likely to complete a running program and retain longer
Users training for a specific event or maintaining a running regimen convert and retain at higher rates
Social engagement: users who post, like, share in the community feed within 7 days convert at higher rates

Project Hypotheses

If users pick interesting topics in onboarding, we can deliver smarter content recommendations and display more relevant and customized content
If we communicate a clearer value proposition in onboarding, we will improve sign-up completion and improve conversion metrics.

Mapping New User Flow

I initially proposed an onboarding and sign-up flow that would branch users into those with a higher assumed motivation level (weight loss, training for a race) and users who were more interested in either ad-hoc workouts or training programs. In descoping the project for V1, we chose to implement topics to follow and design new content blocks for the home screen. Below shows the initial flow and areas where we simplified.

Onboarding

Based on feedback from data science, we added a value prop slider to onboarding and gave the UI a refresh with pill buttons and full bleed images.

Because TRE content was already being tagged in the CMS backend of the app, giving users a way to tag themselves and match with more relevant content was a step we could take immediately towards surfacing the right content for the right users. Users’ goals, experience level and favorite topics will now deliver more customized content to the home feed and library.

New Home With Smarter Content

Our new home experienced utilized horizontal scrolling, which takes more time to plan out than vertical scrolling, but invites the user to thumb-browse quickly, reduces the chance of overwhelming users by several screens worth of horizontal scrolling and it simply a more trend-oriented design pattern.

Content Library

Removing the navigation tabs and replacing them with horizontal scrolling simplified the library UI, reducing taps and allowing for all content to be browsed in one place. Additionally, we found users were rarely using the search and filter feature, so the search and filter bar was moved to the top of the screen as a persistent tool.

Design system thinking

One of the team goals for this project was a design language and reusable components that would increase our design and development velocity. By incorporating the findings from user research into component designs I was able to help reduce the time spent reinventing the wheel on new design patterns and deliver a family of card component designs with the flexibility to support Creator apps across verticals.