UA
MAPMYRUN
APPLE WATCH

In early 2014, MapMy sent me to Apple to work on our first watch app for the yet to be released Apple Watch.

In the following 6 years, I worked on a number of updates to the app. I even designed our first Google Wear and Samsung watch apps, and eventually helped support versions for future Samsung and Garmin apps.

Then in 2020, I led the design for our most comprehensive Apple Watch redesign. We basically overhauled the original app I designed almost 6 years before, adding new modern interactions with cards and extensive customization options.

Problems

A lot of features and workout screens on the MapMyRun Apple Watch app are only available if the user taps, scrolls, or swipes. This is not super intuitive for users. A lot of our great, existing functionality is buried in the app and is not discoverable immediately. For example, only 16% of users who save an AW + Shoe workout discover the Real-Time Form Coaching gauge screen during the workout.

Measures of Success

By polishing up the UX across the platform, we can increase the number of AW untethered workouts saved and provide users with an experience that “just works.” We have seen that users that view more workout screens on AW come back to save more workouts. The KPIs will be as follows:

  • Increase workout stats discoverability as measured by the % of AW untethered users who view various workout stats with WatchOS >= 6:
    • Splits and heart rate for non-shoe users
    • Form gauge for shoe users

  • Streamline the Start to Save workout experience as measured by the % of first time untethered workout savers who come back to save another untethered workout within 10 days

The Work

This work was to be done by myself and 1-2 engineers. So this would be a more of a scrappy project without much resourcing. So there wouldn’t be time to coordinate any user research prior to the work. Instead we would rely on our own internal metrics and best practices to make decisions.

So initial design work was just an audit of the existing app and competitive research to see how the landscape looked in fitness apps at the time.

Existing app design

We knew the existing app layout was pretty dated at this point. First gen Apple Watch apps relied on a lot of hard to recognize pagination UX for navigation.

Watch OS had evolved a lot in the last few years so we knew that updating those older UX patterns would be the bulk of the work.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis revealed we were too far behind from a purely visual perspective. But some of the apps like from Apple and Nike offers more customization options. Like the ability to re-arrange stats. We figured we could start there and see what it would it be like to come up with an experience that would allow users to choose what information was important to them.

Initial Concepts

Based on the audits and feedback from engineering and product teams, I roughed out two initial concepts that seemed promising.

One would be a scrolling card view based on some of the patterns seen in Apple apps. This would allow of nice collection of views that could be as flexible as we needed, could be organized as our default view. It also, allowed for those view to peak and add some visual indication of how to navigate the screen.

Some newer Apple Watch patterns included view toggling UX. We could utilize this to implement some of the customization patterns we were thinking about. By toggling between the more condensed card view and a more expanded list view, users could choose which pattern felt more intuitive to them. The list view would also come with more accessibility functionality like the ability to adjust font sizes without breaking the design.

The second concept was a widget view. This allowed for more direct navigation between stat blocks instead of relying on scrolling. Ultimately, the form factor of the watch just didn’t leave enough room to include a button navigation style and the relevant stats a user would need to see in a run. This type of navigation was also tricky from an engineering standpoint, as it was not a typical navigation pattern for watch OS.

Final Designs

Final designs also included a visual refresh to align closer to the Under Armour Brand. And because the flagship apps were starting the early stages for their larger visual refreshes, this work served as a great stepping stone to see how users would react to a more Under Armour leaning design. We were also able to leverage a lot of this work to be the foundation for the larger iOS design system update.

Results were tracked in Amplitude and proved to be very successful. The new design and experience significantly improved the key metrics we wanted.

All of the most important parts of the app saw greater engagement with the new UI that was able to more clearly show when there was new cards or information to see.

We also received a lot of user review feedback that the customization features we implemented were very helpful. The users that chose to customize their experience continued to use their own set ups long term.

Results and Reflections

On a personal level, it was really rewarding to get to revisit an experience a number of years later and make such significant improvements. It was one of those times were I could see decisions I made in the past and do better based on my own experience I had gained and the large improvements the software and hardware had made. A lot of the ideas we had early on, like customization options, that were not possible due to tech limitations were now possible. It really felt like coming back to a project and turning it into what we wanted all along.

Convert Untethered Workout Saves to Workout Saved:
5.26% improvement over baseline

% of Apple Watch users with connected shoes viewing Form Coaching Screen:
250% improvement over baseline