Competitive analysis of Keep, Hot Fitness, and FitTime (yellow)

In 2016, the State Council issued a national fitness campaign to enhance people's physique and improve their health level. The government set the tone and elevated national fitness to a top-level national strategy. With the government's active promotion, people have gradually become aware of the need for exercise and fitness, their enthusiasm for sports has increased, and sports facilities have gradually become complete. In terms of fitness venues, by 2014, the output value of the fitness industry was 127.228 billion yuan, and the number of fitness clubs of a certain scale was about 3,650.

According to iResearch Consulting 's "2016 China National Sports Industry Report", from January to September 2016, the user scale of sports apps showed an upward trend, and the average user usage time and frequency also steadily increased.

Nowadays, fitness has become a popular lifestyle. With the development of mobile Internet , mobile fitness apps such as Keep , Hot Fitness , FitTime , Yuepaoquan , and Nike Running have emerged. Keep, Hot Fitness and FitTime are three apps that represent mobile fitness training guidance. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the differences in information architecture and user experience of these three apps, this article conducts a competitive analysis on them.

Market Analysis

Market size

A study by Bidachun Consulting found that in 2015, the number of active users of sports and fitness apps in China exceeded 20 million, a year-on-year increase of 92.1%. It is estimated that the number of active users will exceed 70 million in 2018, and the user scale will maintain a high growth trend for a long time.

Usage of various competing products

At present, there are many sports apps on the market, among which the top three fitness guidance apps are keep, FitTime and Hot Fitness. Among them, as of the third quarter of 2016, the number of keep users showed a linear growth trend and reached about 16.26 million, while the development of FitTime and Hot Fitness was relatively slow, and even the number of users declined. Judging from the number of active users, number of launches and usage time, Keep far exceeds FitTime and Hot Fitness, ranking first, and has good development prospects.

Strategic level analysis (website goals, business layout)

User needs

• Use fragmented time to exercise at low cost
• Professional training guidance and exercise plan and long-term adherence
• Social circles with common interests can accompany each other and make progress together
• Systematic acquisition of fitness knowledge

User positioning

The user positioning of the three fitness apps is similar.

It targets fitness novices and fitness experts, mainly young people who have fitness needs and interests.

Official Introduction

• Keep : Mobile Fitness Coach
• Hot Fitness : Hot Fitness - the best mobile fitness trainer, body and soul are always hot
• FitTime (yellow) : exercise instantly

Product Positioning

• Keep : A fitness app with social attributes based on training and teaching, creating a closed loop of fitness
• Hot Fitness : Focuses on providing online fitness video teaching services, and provides social interactions such as sharing, Q&A, etc.
• FitTime : Provides online teaching, online training camps and other fitness services
  

  Business Model

• Keep : Mall Profitability
• Hot Fitness : No profit model for now
• FitTime : membership recharge, mall profit and online training camp, etc.

Judging from the business models of the three, Keep's profit model is quite standard and appropriate. Hot Fitness currently lacks some business models and does not have a mature profit model, while FitTime has the richest business model and the strongest profitability. However, the richness of the business model must be based on rich functions and a large user base, but its core functions are unsatisfactory and not as good as those of competitors. Naturally, the number of users will not be large. Instead, an overly strong business model will disgust users, reduce user experience and become a major reason for losing users.

Scope level analysis (content requirements, functional specifications)

Functional specifications

Product positioning, user positioning and business model all affect the functional specifications of the product.

Keep's product positioning is to create a closed fitness loop for users. It hopes that when users mention fitness, they only need to open Keep without having to enable other apps to switch. To ensure the comprehensiveness of the fitness app, it covers several major modules such as training, diet, information, social interaction, and shopping mall. The training functions are also designed to be relatively comprehensive. The training guidance ranges from small to large, and is composed of movements, courses, and long-term plans. It also includes relevant records of basic exercise - running. Its product positioning determines the functional specifications, and the scope involved is significantly larger than that of Hot Fitness and FitTime.

The core product positioning of Hot Fitness lies in training tutorials, so its functions are mainly centered around training courses, supplemented by a fitness social circle to provide users with a platform for communication. At the same time, the "Weekly Questions" feature in its social circle provides users with professional fitness guidance.

FitTime's product positioning is to provide customized online training, so it has launched online courses and online training camps, but these functions are only available to paying users. The functions available to general users are fewer and less comprehensive, so its functional specifications are far inferior to the previous two.

Since the three apps have similar user positioning, all of them focus on fitness novices and experts who are interested in fitness. Therefore, the three apps have arrangements for guidance and customization of course functions, and have a certain degree of guidance or freedom for different groups.

Core function comparison

(1) Training

Keep:

• We use a variety of equipment to provide diversified indoor fitness courses for fitness people in different scenarios, at different levels and with different goals.
• Provide thematic and customized fitness training plans for users with different needs.
• Training movements for different parts of the body.

Hot Fitness:

• Four types of fitness plans are provided to users based on their fitness goals.
• Fitness courses using different equipment for different fitness purposes, different exercise parts and different levels of difficulty.

FitTime:

• According to users' different hobbies, it is divided into three parts: practicing with videos, practicing with experts, and practicing according to plans.

Summarize:

Keep currently has a large user base and targets a wide range of people, so the training courses it provides need to be more comprehensive and diversified so that it can be used by people with different fitness levels and goals. Therefore, more thought has been put into the training function, and its training plan function is also designed to be more intelligent and free, providing customized training plans for people with higher fitness levels. The training movements are also more comprehensive. The fitness courses provided by Hot Fitness are similar to those of Keep, which are more comprehensive and clearly categorized. However, the setting of the training plan is a bit rough compared to Keep. It only provides four types of fitness plans unilaterally and simply, which may cause a low match with the user, thus losing the meaning of formulating a training plan. At the same time, Hot Fitness does not provide additional individual action libraries, which may be related to its product positioning. It only provides users with planned and scheduled course training. FitTime lacks functionality in terms of training, with relatively few fitness plans for general users, and many training services are only available to paying users.

(2) Social features

The social circle has now developed into the basic core function of the app and has become one of the necessary functions to increase user stickiness.

All three apps include "Topics", "Dynamics" and "People Nearby/Same City" as the social module functions of the app. By participating in discussions on topics of interest, liking friends' dynamics, cheering, commenting and forwarding, and following people nearby, the distance between users is shortened, user communication is enhanced, and users' fitness social circles are built, thereby increasing user stickiness and activity.

In contrast, Keep features groups as its social circle, allowing users to gather together with common goals and interests and communicate with other users online and offline. Hot Fitness uses "rankings" as its social feature, ranking users according to the number of likes, training time and number of featured recommendations. On the one hand, it provides expert references for novice users, and on the other hand, it encourages users to actively train, promotes dynamic communication and contribution of experiences, and increases user activity and connections between users. FitTime's social circle is rather standard, with fewer highlights compared to the other two.

(3) Fitness information

Keep:

• Discovery : All fitness information can be seen in the selected topic column, articles are classified by various topics, and articles are pushed in the banner part of each page of discovery, which increases the possibility of users viewing fitness information.

Hot Fitness:

• Discovery : Selected reading materials such as must-reads for beginners, diet and nutrition, fitness Q&A, and hot stories are pushed to the center of the discovery page, allowing users who are just starting to exercise to understand the basic knowledge related to fitness and to be inspired by other people's stories.
• Yuelan : Push fitness-related information in multiple forms of articles and videos, and provide category browsing, so that users can quickly find the content in the category they need to view.

FitTime

• Discovery : It includes 4 major categories: diet, Q&A, motivation, and skills. It has rich content, clear classification, and it is easy to get what you need.

Summarize:

The fitness information of Hot Fitness is more clearly categorized and more readable.

Compared with Hot Fitness, although Keep and Fittime have categories, the content is a bit messy, and the categories of Keep are not very obvious.

When a novice uses Keep and fittime, they don’t know what knowledge to acquire first. It is more direct to provide guidance to new users by reading "Hot Fitness Must-Reads".

(4) Special features

Keep:

• [My Course Schedule] allows users to customize training plans according to their own circumstances and add them to the calendar in units of courses.
• The [Diet] column provides users with food calorie inquiries, as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner eating recommendations for people with different fitness purposes.

Hot Fitness:

[Ranking] Rank users by their training minutes, number of likes, and number of selections, and list training rankings, popularity rankings, and contribution rankings to increase users' enthusiasm for exercise

Fittime:

• 【Timer】Provides HIIT training for users in the form of a timer.
• [Customized Training] Use actions as units to create your own training plan.

Summarize:

The features of the three apps are reflected in their differences.

Keep's [Course Schedule] develops customized and detailed course training to meet the diverse needs of users, and can reasonably arrange their own training according to the user's schedule, which is a major feature of Keep. Compared with the other two apps, it is more personalized and customized. At the same time, Keep noticed that fitness topics require not only training but also attention to diet. Fitness enthusiasts have a need for dietary knowledge, food calories, and menu planning. Therefore, the diet module is added to the app, eliminating the need for users to use multiple apps for inquiries and reducing the memory occupied by mobile phone apps. The comprehensive app function planning has a certain appeal to users, and also confirms its product positioning of wanting to create a closed-loop fitness loop. The features of Hot Fitness have been mentioned in the features of the social circle, so I will not repeat them here. FitTime【Timer】is one of its major features, providing special timing services for users' special training or needs. However, as mentioned before, FitTime lacks core functions, so its special features account for too small a proportion and may not be very attractive to users. But its special features are indeed a highlight.

Structural layer analysis (information architecture, interaction design, operation process, user experience)

Information Architecture

Keep:

Hot Fitness:

FitTime:

From the perspective of information architecture, the classification of the three major modules is roughly similar, but there are some differences in the information classification of the "discovery" module.

Here we take the information architecture of the "Discovery" module as an example for analysis:

Since Keep covers a wide range of content, its information architecture is relatively complex. The "Discover" module is divided into four small modules, namely, Selection, Training, Food and Mall. Under Selection, there are three-level navigation bars including "Same City", "Group", "Expert" and "Special Topic". Under this category, the page contents of the first three items are mainly dynamic and have nothing in common with the topic content. The author believes that it is not appropriate to classify these four categories into a unified navigation bar, and the logic is somewhat confusing; in addition, the "topic" content is an integration of information, which is not easy for users to view when placed in a lower-level category, so the information cannot be effectively conveyed to users. Therefore, the author suggests that the first three categories can be classified under the "dynamic" column, which is more reasonable.

Compared with the other two apps, the "Discovery" of Hot Fitness actually covers two modules: "Discover" and "View", separating information and dynamic content, and then dividing the dynamic content into two parts: attention and system recommendations. It has a certain logic and the classification structure is relatively clear.

FitTime's information structure is the clearest, with no redundant information and no overlap between categories, making it easier for users to grasp.

Product Logic

(1) Training

Keep:

Hot Fitness:

FitTime:

Judging from the training course processes of the three apps, the logical construction of Keep and Hot Fitness is roughly the same, covering the three stages of user training: before training, during training, and after training, and interacting with users in certain stages. The product logic construction of Keep and Hot Fitness is relatively smooth. However, Hot Fitness has done a relatively outstanding job in this regard. It completely experiences user needs from the user's perspective. Considering that users may just browse the training and add it to the training course without training immediately, it divides adding and starting immediately into two parts. Asking users whether they need to warm up before training will obviously make users feel good and improve user experience. In contrast, FitTime's product design for the training module simply embeds the video in the tutorial module, without any logical coherence or interaction with users, which reduces the user experience and causes a large number of users to leave.

(2) Add training

When adding training, Keep provides users with the (left) page. Users click to participate in training and then jump to the (middle) page to start training. However, there is no difference in information transmission between the two pages. The content is exactly the same, only the layout is different. The author believes that there is no need to divide the simple two steps into two pages. It not only gives users the impression that there is too much cluttered information, but also has the problem of information redundancy. Hot Fitness places two buttons on the same page, allowing users to choose to add courses without training. In comparison, the operation of Hot Fitness is simpler and does not require too much thinking.

Interaction Design and User Experience

(1) Training details page

On the training details page, all three apps place a bright, prominent button in a prominent position as a sign to start the training. However, the training details are slightly different. Keep (middle) hides the training instructions in the center of the page, and requires users to click the arrow on the right to enter the details page. However, most users do not pay much attention to the training instructions and do not know what is covered, so they are less likely to click to enter. Furthermore, the user needs to click enter-view-exit multiple steps before they can finish reading and prepare to start training, which is a complicated operation. Assume a scenario where a user needs to view the instructions repeatedly. The user must repeatedly view and exit the instructions, which is not a user-friendly experience. Over time, users no longer check the training instructions, making the training instructions useless. Hot Fitness (left) places the training instructions below the action preview and displays them in a convenient and fast scrolling manner with the text centered, which is clear and can increase user attention. FitTime (right) allows you to swipe left and right to view details and actions, which is similar to Hot Fitness and is relatively convenient to operate.

(3) Action introduction page

The action introduction of Keep shows all the actions in the form of animated images, and the details are shown in the form of sub-pictures. Key points, precautions and common mistakes are presented in text form, and the exercise parts are informed by human body diagrams. The hot fitness action details are played in the form of videos, with voice prompts of the points that users need to focus on, and the videos are shot from different angles so that users can find the key points from all aspects. It seems that although the information transmission of the two is presented in different forms, the actual experience of users is quite different. Hot Fitness is in video form, so users generally need to download it under wifi conditions and wait for the download to be completed. In addition, after the action is completed, it will terminate the playback and the user needs to click replay to play it again. Assume a user scenario where the user is training under wifi conditions but not yet connected. For a certain action that needs to be viewed in detail, the user must first connect to wifi - wait for download - after the download is complete, place the phone in a certain position and learn the action by referring to the coach. Before the action is completed, the playback is finished and the user needs to stop the action and click replay to learn again. Such complicated operations and inefficient learning will make users feel bored, significantly reduce user experience, and cause users to switch to other competing products. On the contrary, Keep repeatedly displays animated images in a loop, which does not require additional traffic or waiting for download time. It can be viewed directly. At the same time, it provides comprehensive information and presents useful information to users in a variety of forms such as text and graphics, so that users have a comprehensive understanding of the actions and are impressed by them. It truly guides users and increases user satisfaction with the app.

(4) Training page

Keep and Hot Fitness are very similar in this interaction. The training is conducted in the form of video playback instruction. The background music can be adjusted, all training movements can be previewed, and pause, next movement and previous movement can be selected. Training has voice prompts; page information includes the ratio of the current number of movements to the total number, training progress bar, and the name of the current movement. What makes Keep stand out is that during the training process, it can browse other movements of the current training, so it has a grasp of the overall training and is more thoughtful.

FitTime is slightly inferior to the other two apps in terms of interactive details in this regard. Its simple training video playback is not divided into each action, which makes it inconvenient for users to replay and fast-forward in units of actions.

(5) Training plan selection

Interaction process:

• Keep: Users can choose the training plan they need based on the training equipment, training parts and training difficulty. Users can select all categories at once, and multiple selections of the same category are supported. In terms of training plan formulation, users are provided with prompt-oriented training plans to independently set personalized training plans. Even if users have a certain degree of autonomy, they will not feel at a loss as to where to start.
• Hot Fitness: Categorizes training plans by training equipment, training parts and training difficulty. However, users need to filter three times to get the plan they need, which is a bit cumbersome. However, when selecting a training plan, users can obtain a phased training calendar at one time according to the training objectives.
• FitTime : Only members can choose training plans. General users cannot use training plans to plan training.

Summarize:

FitTime does not provide training plans for general users, and the training plans provided to members are also very few, which is a big gap compared with Keep and Hot Fitness. Compared with Hot Fitness, Keep is simple to operate when choosing a training plan, and gradually guides users to customize a training plan that suits them when customizing a training schedule, giving users more choices and combinations. The user experience is more humane and better than Hot Fitness, which directly gives 4 training plans.

From these two points of view, the interaction design of Keep is completely opposite to that of Hot Fitness. Keep selectively simplifies or details the interaction steps. When selecting courses, when there is no progressive relationship between categories but a parallel relationship, Keep chooses to simplify the screening process and completes the selection in one go. When formulating training plans, the steps are detailed, and users are guided step by step to customize a plan that suits them in a persuasive manner. In this process, users make choices in a progressive manner and feel the customized service that belongs to them. The user experience will be significantly better than the training plans directly provided by Hot Fitness. The limited combinations will limit users' choices and fail to achieve the user's inner satisfaction.

Framework layer analysis (interface design, navigation design, information design)

Discover

Summary: All three have interfaces that are as simple and clear as possible, without overly exaggerated colors and structures, and the visual effects are relatively comfortable. All three use a large number of visually impactful images as guides and to convey information, increasing the likelihood of users browsing and clicking. At the same time, all three use rudder-style navigation as the first-level menu placed at the bottom of the screen, which is in line with user habits, and superimposes different types of second and third-level navigation for classification. The structure is clear and the operation is smooth.

Summarize

After analyzing from all aspects, keep has a larger market share, a larger user base, and a better user experience than Hot Fitness and FitTime. It is comprehensive in functions, friendly in interaction, and user-centric, giving users a certain degree of autonomy, guidance, and instruction, thus satisfying users' demands for mobile fitness apps. However, there is still room for improvement in information design and small interactive details, and the profit model can be further expanded.

Although Hot Fitness's user base and activity level are not as good as FitTime's, its user experience is much better than Fittime, its core functions are relatively complete, and it also takes the needs of novices into consideration in terms of fitness-related information, with special content such as must-sees for novices. At the same time, it has clear classifications, a concise and clear interface design, and relatively clear logic in information design. However, it lags behind Keep in interactive design, and its profit model is also lacking.

FitTime's user experience is significantly worse than that of Keep and Hot Fitness. Its core functions are not fully open, making it difficult to attract ordinary users. At the same time, the interaction on the training videos is too simple and appears crude, and its profitability is too strong, which can easily disgust users. However, it still has two points in terms of special functions and information.

If I were a PM

Keep:

• Combining food with shopping malls, not only can we launch recipes , but we can also cooperate with relevant merchants to launch related recipes or healthy food takeaway services.
• For the diet module, a module is launched for users to record daily diet and calculate calories and nutrients , etc., and a function can be published.
• In the same city, not only the dynamics of local users can be pushed, but also some local activities can be pushed in the form of banners to promote users' online and offline social interaction and increase user stickiness.
• Give away mall coupons in the form of completing tasks, activities, etc. to promote user consumption.
• Establishing a points system where users can redeem goods using their points can increase user stickiness.
• Rationalize the content classification of the [Discover] section to make it more logical.

Hot Fitness: Expanded its featured function [Weekly Questions], combining paid answering with the question-and-answer session, allowing users to pay to ask questions and have them answered by experienced users. This increases interactivity between users, encourages sharing among users, solves simple questions and answers, and at the same time increases app profitability.

FitTime: enrich and open core functions

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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