Love Life Longer™
SilverSneakers is a brand within TivityHealth that focuses on senior fitness and health. As a part of Medicare and other health insurance plans, they are poised with the task of making their program benefits known to seniors as well as encouraging seniors to workout at gyms and capture that data.
SilverSneakers’ main mission is to encourage seniors to workout and check in to classes and gyms which would inspire a healthier and longer lifestyle.
SilverSneakers’ main mission is to encourage seniors to workout and check in to classes and gyms which would inspire a healthier and longer lifestyle.
Achieving the MVP
In collaboration with the team at TivityHealth, the Synapse team all started out the process with a quick sprint to start listing out features, technical concerns, goals, ideas, and so on. The goal of this sprint was to define the MVP since we wanted to release an app on the store before a certain deadline. Having an MVP also helps us lock us down to features we know we need to meet business goals, and wait for market and user feedback to determine which other features we need to add on later.
Once we defined the minimal features we were starting with, we kicked off the product cycle with a design sprint creating simple wireframes. I opted to do super basic grayscale wireframes at first and prototype them to quickly establish some common UX interactions when it comes to flows such as onboarding and registration. Spending more time on interactions and flow here rather than aesthetics helped the team stay focused on who our target audience is and optimizing their path of success.
Since a lot of our features were “common” features of existing apps, the teams used that to our advantage by researching popular fitness apps to see where the trend lies and come up with the pros and cons of each interaction. We later tested our assumptions using UserTesting to help us pinpoint a direction to land on.
Once we defined the minimal features we were starting with, we kicked off the product cycle with a design sprint creating simple wireframes. I opted to do super basic grayscale wireframes at first and prototype them to quickly establish some common UX interactions when it comes to flows such as onboarding and registration. Spending more time on interactions and flow here rather than aesthetics helped the team stay focused on who our target audience is and optimizing their path of success.
Since a lot of our features were “common” features of existing apps, the teams used that to our advantage by researching popular fitness apps to see where the trend lies and come up with the pros and cons of each interaction. We later tested our assumptions using UserTesting to help us pinpoint a direction to land on.
Stress Testing Designs
While designing the app and fleshing out features such as maps and list views, it was very important for us to always think about our audience. Because our audience are seniors that are 65+, there’s a lot to take into consideration when it comes to design and interactions. Certain behaviors such as swiping gestures and colors had to be revised and tweaked to make sure everything is usable and legible.
One of the bigger challenges that came into play was the fact that our users heavily used the font-scaling or font changes on their phones. This resulted in a lot of mixed experiences and views for different people. We handled this by stress testing certain components to accommodate such changes and ensured that the components were designed to be more flexible.
One of the bigger challenges that came into play was the fact that our users heavily used the font-scaling or font changes on their phones. This resulted in a lot of mixed experiences and views for different people. We handled this by stress testing certain components to accommodate such changes and ensured that the components were designed to be more flexible.
Continuous Improvement
Once the MVP product was developed and finished, it launched to the app store (SilverSneakersGO) and was downloaded thousands of times reaching an average of 4.0-4.5 star reviews on the Apple/Google Play stores. The greatest part of launching a product quickly is all the feedback we gained from real users. Because we started out with a limited set features, we were able to collect a lot of information about what the users wanted. Some features we thought the user would enjoy were actually lower on the priority list and vice versa.
Over time, Tivity Health continues to work with Synapse Studios to continually improve the application and also advance our efforts to user test using methods like A/B testing and testing prototypes with live users.
Over time, Tivity Health continues to work with Synapse Studios to continually improve the application and also advance our efforts to user test using methods like A/B testing and testing prototypes with live users.
