Research

Following the insights that the positioning and visibility of features inside the running application caused a variety of different issues and pain points for our users, it was first important to gain an understanding of what the most problematic features to find and discover were. Following a collaboration with the researchers at Runtastic a tree testing study was conducted to see where users would look for common features in the running app.

The tree testing identified a high level of misunderstanding about where some features should be located in our app, a lot of these features with a high level of uncertainty were social based features, most of which had been added to the app at later stages through the 10 year life of the running application thus being scattered across the app.

As a next step we wanted to find out where users would cluster features. 2 rounds of card sortings were undertaken. This gave valuable insights on how to create a new IA that users would understand and expect.

Solutions

With both rounds of Card Sorting revealing a largely consistent outcome, we translated these insights into a new tab structure and established a purpose definition for each tab. The goal of setting a clear purpose was to guide  future placement for new features and experiences in the adidas Running app. The structure was defined as follows:

• Newsfeed - Be informed and interact with recent relevant content
• (New) Community - Be motivated through communities, comparison & companionship
• Activity - Setup, track and monitor activities
• Progress - View history, gain insights and set aspirations for the future
• Profile - View and manage adidas Running account and other personal details

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With the existing architecture comprising of a largely modular card based design, reorganising this was fairly easy from a design point of view, the real challenge and effort came when trying to get management buy in to invest in making this change.

This was achieved by presenting the initial user problem with the research findings. We also demonstrated the business value of making this change by setting an outcome to improve the social feature interaction and friend connection rates. 2 metrics that we believed would be positively impacted.

Testing and Feedback

With such a major change to the way the user would interact with the app it was crucial sufficient testing was done to validate that the research based changes worked on a practical level for users. I, alongside a couple of other designers created a substantial prototype covering all main tabs and the specific user journeys covered in the usability test tasks. The prototype was built using Figma and the usability test was conducted with both new and existing users.

In total 8 people tested this concept and were given a series of tasks to reach features within the app. We observed and then concluded if the task had been a success or failure based largely on if a user managed to successfully find the feature/functionality. In addition to this, we closely monitored the thoughts and feeling of the participants and finally quantified the overall perception towards ease of use with a System Usability Scale.