Freeletics + UserTesting

Freeletics’ objective is to create a space that allows everyone to have access to exercise anywhere, at any time. Creating a platform that is suitable for all standards and capabilities, the Freeletics AI coach adapts training sessions to each individual user based on their goals and needs. In order to gain an accurate representation of their user’s workout standards, the Freeletics team needed to expand its research demographic.

Freeletics’ initially started recruiting testers by accumulating verbal feedback from the public at their local park, the University campus, and on social media. The team had several channels to navigate through every time they required a network of testers for product testing and user research, especially for their target audience in certain countries, languages, or fitness knowledge. The team aspired to adjust this representation and align it with their vision; “to challenge and inspire everyone to become the greatest version of themselves." The retrieval process prolonged the user research and the overall product development timeline.

In order to move faster, Freeletics needed to test more and more. So finding an insight platform that would allow the organization to get fast feedback was vital to their success.

The team began using UserTesting two years ago and immediately saw a big improvement. They began to create a deeper and more holistic understanding of their customers. Then they started using Live Conversation and found even richer insights. That's because they could probe on topics and uncover the "whys" more quickly - the most important part of generating insights. By using Live Conversation, Freeletics connected with their users on a more emotional and human level. This helped pinpoint recurring themes that turned their insights into more action that moved the needle on business metrics while solving unmet customer needs. 

For example, the team leveraged UserTesting to recruit runners for a strategic initiative to understand what runners wanted from their running experience and WHY. From that research, combined with in-house testing, the team realized that their main focus should be on the audio experience, not visuals. Audio training was found to be more beneficial while exercising, while images were found to be helpful in increasing motivational drive. The team also gained insights on how the pace at which customers did their running exercises can be used to deliver a tailored and personalized experience based on their preferred pace and ability. Freeletics gained similarly actionable insights across a number of initiatives, from testing messaging copy to onboarding flows and training flows.

As a result of leveraging UserTesting, Freeletics was able to create and analyze tests far more quickly than before, and with greater input. They were able to significantly reduce the number of channels they had to navigate through during the recruitment process. The timeline for planning and collecting feedback was restructured to create a faster and smoother process for discovery and hypothesis testing.

Today, the Freeletics team continues to be more proactive with their research by using a diverse range of use cases that they can deploy in minutes with UserTesting. For example, A/B testing is utilized for everything from messaging to UI flows to design choices, such as which pictures on the Freeletics app will be most motivating for their users.

Looking forward to the future, the Freeletics user research team is now teaching people from other departments to scale human insights across the company. They are teaching others how to use UserTesting in order to help them understand the people they are building products for, while enabling the broader organisation to make more conscious decisions that are directly impacting customer retention, localisation, activation, and engagement growth.