MyFitnessPal app
Creating a top 2 Premium feature
The challenge: increase 1st 7-day food logs
The product and design teams at MyFitnessPal were charged with increasing first-7-day food logs. Being on the Logging team at the time, our goal was to make the process of logging food easier and quicker.
Fortunately, our UX research and data teams had years of qualitative and quantitative data about user logging behavior. After looking through the UX research and data, along with our competitive research, we came up with a list of potential ideas.
The list included bigger ideas like voice logging and AI, but for this challenge, we had to come up with a shorter-term “win” for our users.
Problem: Food logging is repetitive
Through our research, we learned that 60% of foods logged with MyFitnessPal are repeat logs, 1 in 5 users log the same breakfast food for 10 or more days in a month, and 68% of users ate the same breakfast at least twice a week. Couple these stats with the fact that a high percentage of users find the MyFitnessPal food logging experience tedious and difficult, and a clear problem surfaced.
Imagine you have a meeting that will take place at the same time Monday through Friday, every week, but cannot set it to repeat. How tedious would it be to manually add that meeting every weekday with no defined end date in sight? This would not seem like the “smart” approach, even if it were just for the month. Similarly, we wanted to offer a smarter approach for the user.
Repeat food logging?
The first solution we tested was Repeat Food Logging, which we hypothesized would make logging some foods less repetitive by enabling users to select the day(s), time, and end date (optional) that they consume a food or drink.
This way, you only have to log the unique foods eaten that day. This would add convenience for the user, as well as enable the app to continuously have data to communicate with the user about (e.g. nutritional feedback, progress, and recommendations.)
During discovery with the team, however, we realized this repeat feature would take a much larger amount of work on the backend than anticipated 😅.
Multi-Day Food Logging ✔︎
Fortunately, engineering found that if we limited the repeat log to only the next 7 days, this would be a much more feasible test to see if we wanted to potentially invest in the full Repeat Log feature.
As another way to save engineering time and get the test out the door, we decided to start with a proof of concept that would only be available on the Food Detail page. This would limit discoverability, but we could collect data on how many users who went to the food detail page decided to use the multi-log feature.
UX research says: it’s a go!
We tested the proof of concept among current active MyFitnessPal users, and they all liked the design, but not surprisingly, we had mixed responses as to whether the feature was something they would use. This is consistent with the fact that some users appreciate the process of food-logging – the satisfaction and mindfulness it brings to food choices – and other users find it tedious and are open to any ways possible to alleviate the repetition.
Multi-day log becomes top-2 feature used by Premium users
We launched the feature as part of an A/B test where we quickly saw a 4% increase in day 0 food logs, a significant statistic for the MyFitnessPal app.
The multi-day log feature also became one of the top-used features among Premium subscribers within its first year, second only to MyFitnessPal’s legacy feature – barcode scanning.
