How BetterMe Uses Testing to Adapt Quickly and Improve Its User Experience

Since its launch in 2016, BetterMe has helped its members in 190 countries achieve their fitness and wellness goals. The family of apps includes workouts like yoga, meditation, walking, and strength exercises, as well as nutrition tracking, mental health coaching, and motivation and accountability through community. Awarded the Fastest Growing App of 2018 by app growth awards, BetterMe currently boasts over 100 million downloads.

The pandemic upended countless industries, not least health and wellness. But while BetteMe was well positioned to capitalize on the shift from gyms and group fitness classes to home workouts, the company also found itself in catch-up mode. It scrambled to adapt to the behavioral changes of its users, such the marked increase in time users were spending on the app.

Lilliia Lutsenko, a BetterMe product analyst and Amplitude Datamonster of the Year for 2020, turned to Amplitude to quickly determine the changing needs of BetterMe’s users and the best way to respond to those shifts. As she notes, “The speed of experimenting and responding to our users were our main challenges. We wanted to maintain a high satisfaction level for our users during the process, so we were constantly balancing velocity and satisfaction levels.”

Lillia knew she had an ally in Amplitude, which she describes as an accessible-to-anyone, “all-in-one instrument” with resources for segmentation, cohorts, A/B testing, funnels and more. “Amplitude also offers an option to aggregate user behavior to see the general picture, which is often impossible with other tools,” Lillia notes.

As it strove to meet the needs of its growing user base, BetterMe leveraged many of Amplitude’s offerings to help answer critical strategic and product questions, including how its new features were affecting user retention and revenue rates, and more specifically, which releases were gaining traction and which were not.

Amplitude’s AB testing capabilities were an important tool in this process. “We do A/B testing often and in several stages because we want to analyze behavior and improve [the user experience] in order to boost metrics,” Lilliia says. “From one test, we’ll conduct two or three iterations in order to achieve the best results.”

This sort of quick testing allowed BetterMe to improve one of its key features, Calorie Tracker.

“Using Amplitude Funnel Chart, we reviewed the drop, then we developed a hypothesis as to why and finally, we created an ‘ABC’ test.” The tests revealed many users balked at an additional step to log meals. BetterMe responded by simplifying that process, which resulted in a 14% spike in the number of users engaging with BetterMe’s Calorie Tracker, a key product metric.

Amplitude has been a boon to other teams at BetterMe too. “Amplitude is super intuitive. It’s been integral to creating an open and data-driven culture at BetterMe,” Lilliia explains. “Both developer and product teams use Amplitude for insights into users and track technical metrics.”

Lilliia has used a variety of Amplitude’s resources to increase visibility across teams. “What makes Amplitude special to our business is its multifunctional application. We use Charts and Dashboards to visualize data to make it clear and accessible to the whole team, and Notebooks to present reports on specific ideas.”

She continues: “Notebooks help us aggregate thoughts and connect them in a coherent way, helping the entire teamwork faster.”We also use Notebooks to update our strategic goals and keep them in one place. Every week, I place my charts into Amplitude Notebooks so everyone can access them.”

In addition to using Amplitude for running experiments and keeping track of outcomes, Lilliia uses Amplitude for presentations, such as her team’s weekly meetings with the management team, during which she offers the results of her latest A/B tests and data on any newly released features

“Many users may underestimate the wide assortment of tools Amplitude has to accelerate their work and make it easier,” she observes.

For such a fast growing app, it’s critical that BetterMe’s partners can keep up and scale with them. “Amplitude allows us to grow faster,” Lilliia explains, “it provides us with a level of flexibility and speed to garner data insights within minutes and verify our hypotheses within days.”

While speed is crucial, Lilliia also greatly values Amplitude’s accessibility. “As a product analyst, I have a lot of requests. With such an accessible user interface, our product managers can also check on different hypotheses and generate new ideas for developing our product, because they understand how.”

Lilliia says she is energized by what BetterMe, along with Amplitude, is helping its users accomplish

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