Overview
Nike Run Club (NRC) is one of the most popular fitness apps on the market and boasts over 100 million users. The app is most well known for its guided runs built for a diversity of skill levels and feature the mentorship of professional coaches and athletes. Nike Run Club was created with the main purpose of supporting new runners or those working to elevate their fitness levels. Although the app is free to use, Nike Run Club app has played a large role in fueling Nike’s digital presence and driving both Nike product (ie. Nike Smart Shoes in-app integration) and membership sales. Through various community engagement features, NRC promotes the “Nike experience” and brings consumers to the top of the purchasing funnel while simultaneously gathering vital market data. Overall, the app is well-loved by many of its users for its simplicity and intuitiveness and truly is a product built by runners for runners.
Features
Like many fitness apps, Nike Run Club has a community feature that allows you to add friends, post your runs and give users the opportunity to “cheer” their friends on. The Nike Run Club app is also notably gamified, in an attempt to further motivate users, through the use of “badges” that can be earned through various achievements and challenges. Beyond your local community of friends, the app also encourages users to take part in global community challenges such as the “May 50K Challenge”. NRC further elevates and simplifies the running experience through convenient features such as the Spotify and Apple Music integration and built-in audio feedback for runs that mark intervals and checkpoints. However, what truly separates Nike Run Club from other fitness apps on the market and acts as a unique selling proposition is the highly talented coaches and athletes used in Nike’s guided runs.
Nike Run Club places a large emphasis on making running accessible for people of all skill levels and even goes as far to say that “everyone is a runner”. With this in mind, they have built out a variety of training plans that all assume that you have limited previous experience. Guided “First Runs” have ample coaching and encouragement, and, as a user myself who never would have thought I would willingly go for a run, I found that it made running both easier and enjoyable. Thus, due to this target market of new runners, retention is absolutely key to their success — especially in the early stages where drop off rates are much higher due to numerous factors affecting a user’s motivation.
In order to increase the “stickiness” of NRC users, UX/UI should be a priority at all times. By making the app as convenient as possible, Nike reduces the barriers that have the potential to drive users away and increase the chances of the app being consistently used day after day.
Pain Points
As a relatively new user, one of the largest pain points I have experienced is the lack of integration for the Nike Training Plans. Despite the training plans directly referencing NRC Guided Runs in each week’s training schedule, the training plan itself is a PDF that must be opened on a web browser outside of the app presenting a number of issues. Firstly, due to the fact that the training plan is just a PDF, instead of the app automatically remembering a user’s progress, users must scroll to their current week in the plan every single day. Furthermore, not only are the Guided Runs recommended for each week not linked but there is also no search bar for runs in the app. As a result, users have to go out of their way to guess the category of their run and scroll through countless runs until they find the correct one. Consequently, despite the relative simplicity of the app, this pain point makes Nike Run Club cumbersome to use at times and leaves the user experience with much room for improvement.
Solution
In order to circumvent the above-mentioned sources of frustration and improve the user experience as a whole, I recommend adding a search bar in the “All Runs” tab and integrating the training plans in the app. Some mockups of how this experience would look like in the app are shown below.
Conclusion
Improving and maintaining motivation is one of Nike Run Club’s key value propositions and something Nike has accomplished thus far through high quality guided runs and making sure to celebrate their users’ success throughout their journey. However motivation when it comes to fitness is both hard to come by and notoriously easy to lose. It is only through constantly raising the bar for their in-app experience that Nike Run Club will continue to see user adoption and retention.
