My Plate Calorie Tracker - iPhone & iPad Application
MyPlate is a mobile app that helps you reach your diet, weight loss and fitness goals by tracking your daily calories and exercise. The iPhone app currently serves around 350,000 monthly average active users. I joined the Livestrong.com team as the lead designer for this and Livestrong.com's other lifestyle applications. Because of the work I did on the application user retention increased to 15% and the app store rating improved from a 3.5 to a 5 star rated application.
View in Apple App Store
Project Background
In February of 2014 I joined the Livestrong.com team at Demand media to provide UX design and direction for its mobile applications. I am now part of a small team of 4 who have been shipping updates and creating new features for the application over the past year.
Updates to the application have been driven by several goals over the last year. Some of which include:
- A desire by everyone on the team to simplify and modernize the app.
- Feedback from customer support and our active community.
- Business goals, user analytics and research into the health and fitness field.
While being an advocate for the general user experience of the application I also needed to be mindful of the existing user base. Any changes to the application would need to be progressive enhancements and provide an tangible benefit to the users.
The Team
On this team I served as the sole UX designer working with developers, our product manager and QA. We are a small but agile team that works very close with each other. I contributed to high-level strategic decisions with the rest of the product team and focused on being an advocate for the user. I provided a variety of deliverables throughout the project and saw features from initial conception, to iterating back and forth with the developers and shipping to the app store.
I believe great product are created with a symbiotic relationship between design, development and business needs. I sit embedded with the development team and we are often bouncing ideas back and forth, when building features we often pair design-develop based on initial sketches and rough mockups. When possible I will make the necessary UI edits in the Xcode Storyboards and check assets into the builds via Github.
Sketches & Wireframes
Success Metrics
Because of the updates we have done over the past year user retention has increased by 10% from the Fall of 2013 to the Fall of 2014. We use a combination of Flurry and Mixpanel for our tracking.
The number of users who launch the application and go all the way through to tracking a food has increased by 20% from the Fall of 2013 to the fall of 2014. Improvements to the tracking flow have made it quicker and easier for users to track their meals and exercise daily.
In previous years (2011, 2012) we would have a drop in users after our initial raise during the new year fitness season. This year we are not seeing as strong of a drop.
We still have a lot of improvements and iterations to make to create a quicker easier calorie tracking experience. I am happy with how far we have come in the past year and excited about where we will be taking the app in the future.