Scoopful
Diet & Exercise Tracking App
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Skills & Considerations Applied
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Problem
Individuals who participate in personal fitness, particularly strength training, are required to utilize several applications to monitor their dietary intake and exercise routines in a personalized fashion.
Solution
Scoopful allows users to track their diet and exercise under one app. Through its user-friendly interface, Scoopful offers a personalized experience that effectively highlights and tracks their progress, setting it apart from other available applications.
Summary
Scoopful is a fitness app that allows users to track their diet and exercise. It started as a protein tracking app that I created for my own personal use in February 2022. After gaining a smaller user-base and as my needs changed, the app was redeveloped into a full-service tracking fitness app. The redeveloped version launched January 1, 2023. Scoopful was the product that was accepted to participate in the Winter 2023 cohort of the Starter Studio startup accelerator program.
Inception
It was early 2022 when I had started taking my bodybuilding journey more seriously, which meant I needed to track my macros (macro nutrients: protein, fat, carbs, calories).
This product was born out of a personal need in response to lacking UX experiences in protein intake tracking. Because of that, this project does not follow traditional or structured design/dev, not until September 2022.
Of course, like many, my first solution was to use a calculator on my phone. This became a problem in case I needed to do other calculator tasks or if I had closed the app, my daily progress would be lost.
Using the Notes app was alright but it was a little more cumbersome with more steps involved than the calculator app.
MyFitnessPal was next, but I couldn’t track all my macros without paying and I couldn’t justify the cost in my mind for something I felt could be done with less steps and was, essentially, easy to track. So I decided to create my own one or two tap app for tracking my protein.
The name Scoopful came from the idea that you usually take a scoop full of protein in a protein shake, the name stuck for me.
Inspiration
The calculator app on my iPhone was the leading example of what I wanted for protein tracking. The iPhone calculator app featured minimal steps with quick feedback. This app was the basic premise of what I wanted in protein tracking but with daily sums of numbers that had a goal number I wanted to reach. I also did not want the daily progress to be erased until I desired.
First Design & Development
Scoopful was made in the Adalo, no-code, platform. Scoopful’s first version consisted of minimal screens:
1) Sign-Up
2) Sign-In
3) Daily Goal Input
4) Daily Progress
5) Protein Input
The initial user flow looked like this: user downloads Scoopful > Sign-Up > Daily Goal Input > Daily Progress > Protein Input. After the initial user flow, users would see only two screens repeatedly: Daily Progress & Protein Input. Once a meal is consumed the user would open the app, tap “add protein” on the Daily Progress screen to navigate to the Protein Input screen. On the Protein Input screen the user would tap an input box, type the number of grams of protein consumed, then add tap a plus (+) icon. This action would update the user’s daily protein intake and return them to the Daily Progress screen.
Observation
In a matter of 5 months I gained 100 users. What was interesting is that I performed absolutely no promotion of the app – again it was made for my sole use, and if anyone else benefited from it then great!
I also had grown in my knowledge in bodybuilding and desire to achieve my personal physique goal. In order to reach my fitness goals I had to take my diet and exercise more seriously to see the results I wanted. This meant tracking not just protein but all of my macros and calories. I also did not follow anyone else’s meal plan, I liked to keep my own preferences over what I ate. So I didn’t need meal plans but instead a way to track the nutrition for whatever I ate.
For my exercises, I liked to try new exercises and gain inspiration from social media influencers in fitness. This meant I needed the personalization ability of creating exercise names with the sets, reps and weight for each exercise.
With these needs in mind and my skills in UX burgeoning I decided that it was proper timing for a product update.
Second Design & Development
I entered September 2022 with some basic ideas of how I wanted the new user flow to look. Diet is pivotal to fitness so I wanted the diet tracking screen to be the Home screen of the app. From there I wanted exercise to be a different parent page from the Home screen.
For diet I still wanted to keep the calories and macros progress the main feature on the home screen so a user can open the app and see their progress at a glance at any time. For practicality, a bar for visual progress did not seem to provide the best UI so I decided to go with a circular progress element, sort of like a pie chart. I wanted macros to update either individually or collectively based on the user’s choice.
One of the problems I ran into was how could users quickly input calories and macros for foods they eat frequently. That’s when I figured that there needs to be “saved” meals that users frequently eat to expedite calories and macros input. I didn’t want to use the word “meal” because not all foods are meals, sometimes it is a snack not a meal per say or a user might not consider a protein shake as a meal and confuse the user as to whether inputting the nutrition values is justified.
For exercise I wanted to allow users to select from a list of exercises they’ve created then be able to quickly add sets, reps and weight for that respective exercises with the least amount of taps, scrolling, and inputs possible. When doing an exercise in the gym you usually perform one set at a time so to bypass one more input by the user the default input for sets completed would be one (1) with the ability to change to other numbers if desired.
In addition to the set-by-set completion of an exercise, I wanted to include a rest period timer that would start after a set is completed. These rest periods vary by user so I would need to allow the user to increase or decrease the time but have a default rest period. That is when I figured that there needs to be a workout setup process before the actual workout began.
In this workout setup the user could select from a list of custom saved exercises that they could select all that apply then select their rest period. I would also like for the workout to have a name so the user could review their weekly progress and have workout names they could refer to rather than scan through all the exercises they did, i.e. it’s easier to denote what a chest day is rather than seeing a list of chest related exercises.
To shorten the time-to-workout and enable organization for the user, I wanted to add “routines”. These routines would be collections of the saved exercises that the user already created. It would also allow a saved exercise to be used in multiple routines. I also decided that there could be a default rest period for each routine, further expediting the user’s time-to-workout.
Another feature I wanted to add was a supplement tracker. The idea comes from the times when I wonder if I overshot my caffeine limit for the day and if I had taken my dietary vitamins. I’m a natural bodybuilder (a natty in gym talk) but not all bodybuilders are natural and take performance enhancers drugs. Some of these PEDs are harmful so it is important to know the dosage and time of administration, so having a supplement tracker could have the potential of preventing a hospitalization or even worse. For this supplement tracker I want the user to create their saved supplements with dosage. When the user taps on the supplement in the tracker then the icon and typography would turn gray and move to the bottom of the list and show how long ago the last dosage was taken.
The last feature I wanted to include was a weight tracker, for body weight in pounds. This feature would be a simple line graph chart that accounted for day and pounds.
After all these features were developed the app submitted to the App Store and Play Store in January 2023.
Starter Studio
Shortly after the second version was launched, I received notification for applications being accepted for the upcoming cohort at Starter Studio Build Stage startup accelerator program. I decided to submit Scoopful as my means to participate and I was accepted into the accelerator. I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience, I gained so much in a short amount of time. The accelerator ran from January until April.
During this time I refined Scoopful’s Value Proposition, Customer Journey, Go To Market Strategy and more. I won’t share those pieces of information here but I will share where Scoopful fits into the fitness app landscape.
Scoopful does not provide meal or workout plans. In fitness, each individual has unique needs, desires, tastes, and affinities. For example, while I consider myself a bodybuilder, I do not look for competition-minded workout plans. I look for exercises that emphasize mind-muscle connection and “negative” contractions. This means that a workout plan that works for one person might not work well for me, BUT we both still need to track our progress. That’s what Scoopful offers, is a sort of canvas for one’s fitness. Scoopful sits in a position of offering users the personalization of a notes app with some of the functional power of an Excel spreadsheet, this combined with the one-tap responsiveness of a calculator.
Website
Scoopful’s website was actually created very late. Creating the product and participating in the accelerator took precedent. I also hit a sort of “Writer’s Block” with what the website should have looked like. Then one day I was reviewing the Sales Deck we had created and presented at the end of the accelerator and I thought it would a be good guide for creating the website – so good in fact that Scoopful’s website is almost exactly like the Sales Deck.
Future
I won’t talk much on what’s next for Scoopful openly here, fitness app options are pretty saturated and I don’t want to give away what’s going to continue setting Scoopful apart from other fitness apps. I will say that I am exploring a way to incorporate a similar food search functionality as seen in MyFitnessPal.
I’m very excited to see where things go for Scoopful. I’m passionate about personal fitness, well-being, and development so working on Scoopful is a great pleasure and the thought of how it may help others is very meaningful. Stay Tuned!