‘Jump Back In’ feature

Helping users jump back into their fitness programs

Beachbody’s programs drove retention

Beachbody’s video streaming subscription was used by over 3 million paid subscribers. The most heavily viewed content was their well-known fitness programs, which were series of workouts that came with a workout calendar (see image).

The business’s main goal was driving retention, and data showed that users who followed programs churned at a lower rate.

So the strategy was to enable and encourage users to jump back into recent programs.

The kick-off

We started the project with a kick-off meeting, to align on high-level details such as KPIs, user groups and current behaviors. We came prepared with analytics and insights from prior user interviews that revealed various use cases:

  • Users may or may not move through a program linearly

  • Programs have as many as 100 workouts

  • Some have various workout schedules that users can choose from

Other streaming apps didn’t offer good references

After aligning on our strategy and use cases, we started our UX exploration. We first researched any existing patterns that could be familiar to users. Streaming a TV show was a similar task, so we looked to streamers like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. However, these references were too simplistic, and didn’t account for the varied use cases we needed to cover.

We explored UI options in a workshop and did user testing

We did a collaborative in-person workshop that included Engineering, Product, Design and stakeholders. We sketched options with these goals in mind:

  • Reduce friction - get the user back into their program with as few taps as possible

  • Guide users - subtly give information so they know their status in a program

  • Enable flexibility - don’t just show the next workout

  • Encourage usage - following a program correlates to retention, so we wanted draw users’ attention to it

Following that workshop, we designed various options and tested them with users.

The final design

We aligned on a single option, designed it and launched it on our mobile apps.

We gathered anayltics, made some minor iterations and then launched it front and center on the home screen of web, TV and bike. The module included:

  • A unique layout and ‘Jump Back In’ for a header, encouraging users following programs

  • The ability to swipe through all the workouts, to enable flexibility

  • Their ‘next’ workout (our best guess at it anyway), left-aligned it to the rest of the content

  • A row of all the users recent programs, letting them easily jump between programs

The results

The new module was a huge hit with users. Since launch, it has accounted for over 50% of all home screen interactions, across platforms.

I’d love to hear from you

Email me at andrewturrell@gmail.com to chat about a role or project. I’m open to full-time or freelance.