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Health and fitness apps are one of the most common types of apps in use today. If you want to develop one, you will have a fine balancing act of making your app stand out from the competition while making sure that it provides the features and functionality that the public expects.
Health and fitness apps are one of the most common types of apps in use today. If you want to develop one, you will have a fine balancing act of making your app stand out from the competition while making sure that it provides the features and functionality that the public expects.
What is really nice about these kinds of apps is that regardless of what type you make, there are a lot of features that are fairly universal. This article covers those universal aspects.
You need to consider what kind of health or fitness app you want to make. The following are just some of the types of apps that fall into the health and fitness industry:
There are many different types of apps that fall into this category. If you are a company that is already in the industry, you probably have an idea of what your app needs, so you at least have a starting point. If you want to make an app and you aren’t in the industry, you need to start by figuring out what kind of app you want to make.
Make sure you don’t try to do everything. When people use health and fitness apps, they have something very specific in mind. If you overload the app, they likely won’t bother to learn everything and may decide to find an app that focuses on just the one area that they want to concentrate on. You can consider making several apps that provide specific focuses that can interact. That will let people select just what they need.
This has become an expectation by people who use health and fitness apps. It has the added bonus of giving them an incentive to keep going, which means they are much more likely to keep using your app. Allowing them to connect to their social media accounts means that they can show off just how much they’ve accomplished.
It doesn’t have to be mandatory, and you need to make sure to provide a way for people to access the account without using social media if they aren’t fans of those particular sites. Not everyone needs to share their progress, so you should make sure they still have a way to set up an account.
It isn’t just the social media app that users will want to access from their health and fitness app. Things like the calendar, other health and fitness apps, and games like Pokémon Go that have a health component, are things that people are going to want to be able to track.
For example, if you have a fitness app and the person needs a certain amount of cardio, you want to be able to include features like their phone’s app for recording step count. If you have a nutrition app, pairing this with a workout app can help your users figure out if they are getting too many or not enough calories for their activity level. If you want to develop an app that works with medical information, you probably want to connect it to both email and the calendar so that if users make an appointment, they have easy access to what they need.
Take the time to research apps that could couple with yours to increase the odds that your users will keep using your app after they download it.
Following this suggestion is difficult because there is a fine line between being encouraging and being overly supportive. Push notifications can help remind people to exercise, warn that they are nearing a calorie target for the day, or other health aspects. Push notifications can help to remind them to do what they need to do, and, at least initially, people will be very happy to have them.
However, it is all too easy to go overboard. Make sure that notification options are robust so that people can tailor them. Odds are it will take a while to find just the right number of notifications to keep customers motivated. Let them tweak and change their notifications to best meet their individual needs.
People love to track their progress as they start to get healthier and start maintaining their improvements. Being able to easily see that through the dashboard, then to go into more detail in an analytical area will give them a sense of accomplishment that will encourage them to keep going. Since health is something that requires a long road (especially if a person is out of shape or accustomed to eating a particularly unhealthy diet), there are great odds that a large percentage of your users will stop using the app for a while.
You should make sure that the progress tracking does not shame them if they are absent for a long time. This will simply persuade them it isn’t worth it to keep trying.
People tend to only use simpler apps for one reason. Don’t try to cram a lot into your app or to try to cover a lot of ground in a single app. Provide just a few tabs (three or four typically work best) that are very easy to read and update as needed.
Health and fitness apps tend to appear very simple looking, but a lot more goes into what happens behind the scenes. Between interacting with other apps and allowing updates to things like social media, emails, and calendars, health and fitness apps tend to touch most important apps on a person’s mobile device. There is also a lot of data that goes into it, which needs to be organized in a way that is really easy to read and quick to find what customers need.
These apps require a lot of work for the developers so that it takes no time at all for the users. Fortunately, they don’t require heavy updates to the app itself nearly as often as most other apps do – people do not like their health and fitness apps to change a lot. You will need to update them based on other factors, but the actual presentation of your app probably won’t need to change much or often.