MyFitnessPal app
Multi-day logging adds convenience for MyFitnessPal users
Background
Exploring how to increase first-7-day food logs
Our product and design team at MyFitnessPal ran an exploration workshop to brainstorm ideas that could increase first-7-day food logs. Being on the Logging team at the time, the Product Manager and I were charged with coming up with ways in which we think the process of logging could be easier and quicker.
Fortunately, our UX research and data teams had accumulated years of qualitative and quantitative data around user logging behavior. After looking through the UX research and data, along with doing competitive research, we came up with a list of potential ideas.
The list included bigger ideas like voice logging and AI, but the initial goal was to come up with a shorter-term “win” for our users.
The problem
Food logging is repetitive
Among the years of UX research and data, we learned that 60% of foods logged with MyFitnessPal are repeat logs, and 1 in 5 users log the same breakfast food for 10 or more days in a month. Another study showed that 68% of users ate the same breakfast at least twice a week. Couple these stats with the fact that a high percentage of users feel the food logging experience with MyFitnessPal is tedious and/or 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, our logging team wanted to offer a smarter approach for the user.
Google event scheduler example
One suggested solution
Repeat food logging
One solution we decided to test was Repeat Food Logging, which we hypothesized would make logging some foods less repetitive by enabling users to select when and how often food is logged.
Just as when you’re creating a meeting that repeats, you could select the day(s), time, and end date (if applicable) that you consume a food or drink.
Instead of logging into the app every morning and logging your coffee, morning smoothie, etc, it would already be in your food diary so that you only have to log the unique foods eaten that day. Not only is this more convenient for the user, but it enables the app to continuously have data to communicate with the user about (e.g. nutritional feedback, progress, and recommendations.)
I created wireframes for the Repeat Log feature which were well received among the team…until a tech spike was done and engineering realized this repeat feature would take a much larger amount of work on the backend than anticipated 😅.
A compromise is found
Multi-Day Food Logging
Fortunately, engineering was able to find 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. We would call this feature (drumroll…) Multi-Day Log! I admit, this wasn’t nearly as enticing to me for the user experience as a more customizable repeat log, but it could be enough to show us if there is an appetite for logging foods on multiple days, rather than one at a time.
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
The feature tested positively with current MyFitnessPal users
I modified the prototype to fit the new constraints of this proof of concept and worked with our UX Research team to have the prototype tested among 5 current active MyFitnessPal users.
All users 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.
The results
Increases day 0 logs and is #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.
