Synapse Studios is a web and mobile platform development company that enjoys working with a variety of clients in different industries and with different problems.
From healthcare contracts to automated smart apartments, Synapse Studios strives to take the dull moments of a person’s day and make it both efficient and delightful experience.
In coordination with project managers and developers, I work alongside a full product team and developers to deliver web and mobile apps catered towards the client’s business goals and optimized for their users.
Because I’ve had the privilege to work on a variety of projects at Synapse Studios, I will specifically highlight SilverSneakersGO and the process I went through in this case study. We use similar processes and even evolved it over time for existing and future projects.
As a Product Designer at Synapse Studios, I’m in charge of handling UX, UI, interaction design, front-end development, design systems, and sometimes hints of documenting and extending the brand’s visual identity system. Along with my other co-workers on the design team, we are often shuffled around helping each other and picking up where the other left off.
Many of our web apps created at Synapse Studios are published and displayed in both Apple and Google Play stores.
Specifically to this SilverSneakersGO App (iOS) SilverSneakersGO App (Androi
In collaboration with the team at TivityHealth, the Synapse team all started out the process with a quick sprint to start listing out features, technical concerns, goals, ideas, and so on. The goal of this sprint was to define the MVP since we wanted to release an app on the store before a certain deadline. Having an MVP also helps us lock us down to features we know we need to meet business goals, and wait for market and user feedback to determine which other features we need to add on later.
Once we defined the minimal features we were starting with, we kicked off the product cycle with a design sprint creating simple wireframes. I opted to do basic grayscale wireframes at first and prototype them to quickly establish some common UX patterns when it comes to flows such as onboarding and registration. Spending more time on interactions and flow here rather than aesthetics helped the team stay focused on who our target audience is and optimizing their path of success.
Since a lot of our features were “common” features of existing apps, the teams used that to our advantage by researching popular fitness apps to see where the trend lies and come up with the pros and cons of each interaction. We later tested our assumptions using UserTesting to help us pinpoint a direction to land on.
One of the bigger challenges that came into play was the fact that our users heavily used font-scaling or font changes on their phones. This resulted in a lot of mixed experiences and views for different people.
We handled this by stress testing certain components to accommodate such changes and ensured that the components were designed to be more flexible.
Once the MVP product was developed and finished, it launched to the app store (SilverSneakersGO) and was downloaded thousands of times reaching an average of 4.0-4.5 star reviews on the Apple/Google Play stores.
The greatest part of launching a product quickly is all the feedback we gained from active users. Because we started out with a limited set features, we were able to collect information about user's behavior and how the fitness app fits into their daily life. This helped prioritized certain features based on user needs.
Over time, Synapse Studios collaborated with Tivity Health to continually improve the application and also advance our efforts to user test using methods like A/B testing and testing prototypes with live users.