Design a Meta (Facebook) product to help people follow a healthy living lifestyle.
- Bina Campos
Here’s how I would attempt this question.
1. What – Goal: I am assuming that the goal here is to acquire and engage a customer segment and enable them to hit their healthy living goals.
2. Who – Customer Segments: I’ve thought of three segments here:
a) Students: Most active socially on FaceBook and tend to engage with anything which goes viral. They have a decent amount of time everyday to workout after their studies.
b) Working Professionals: Have very less workout time. Constantly trying to balance personal and professional lives along with their fitness. Tend to have large social networks on FaceBook but don’t spend much time engaging with them like the ‘Students’ do.
c) Elderly: Comprised of seniors who now have more to spend with friends on FaceBook. Not as technically savvy as the other groups but are definitely interested in healthy living considering their advancing years.
Of all the three categories I pick category (b) – Working Professionals for this initiative. They are a large customer segment who don’t spend enough time on FaceBook (making them spend time on FB through this initiative would be a bonus) and they also have the greatest challenge amongst all the three segments to stay fit.
3) Where – Channel – I am assumming that this initiative for starters will be on the mobile channel (iOS/Android) before it’s expanded to the Desktop Channel.
4) Problems of Working Professionals which prevent them for healhy living:
- They don’t know how much to work out
- They don’t know what to eat
- They lack goals
- They are not aware of the best practices which lead to health
I have ranked the needs from basic to advanced. The first step in healthy living is to establish a daily routine followed by goal setting and then pivoting towards best practices.
5) Product Vision: AI based Mobile Fitness Tracker Bot within Facebook App.
- Tracks Food Intake
- Amount of calories burnt while working out/walking/running
- Measures the workout against established benchmarks and lets the user know how well they are performing week on week
6) Use Cases:
- Fitness bot stores height, weight and age and automatically calculates BMI.
- Fitness bot allows the user to set weight reduction goals.
- Fitness bot when turned on estimates the amount of calories burnt based on the activity the user takes up
- User can upload images of lunch, dinner and snacks to the fitness bot for it to estimate the amount of calories being consumed by the user
- Fitness bot alerts the user if the user falls behind weekly goals
- Fitness bot ranks you in your network based on the goals you achieved
- Fitness bot allows you to see the fitness regime of Friends who have subscribed to the bot in your network
- Fitness bot suggests foods you can consume based on what you are currently eating
- Users can high rankers within their network for exercise and diet tips
7) Prioritization of the use cases: Considering implementation time, satisfaction and time taken to grow an active user base I am going to prioritize the first fives cases for implementation as part of MVP. These five use cases also answer to the first three needs of this segment. The last need of this segment i.e. best practices will be taken care of by the last two use cases which are future features on the roadmap.
8) Trade-Offs:
- Privacy: Users would have to be reassured that their fitness data would be held private and unless or otherwise approved will not be used for advertising
- AI: Identification of lunch and dinner via photos uploaded by the user might lead to incorrect and inconsistent results. Hence when the bot is unable to identify the lunch being consumed we should allow the user to manually enter the info or give a selection of food options for the user to pick
- Notifications: When the user doesn’t enter the calories consumed via lunch/dinner/snacks that day, the bot will send a notification to the user which will be lost in the deluge of notifications that the user is receiving unless it’s explicitly made to stand-out.
- Advice of best practices in diet must be customized as per the geography. Hence it’s best to probably start this particular feature set in one geography before expanding it to the whole world
- The bot might end up turning off several users who might find it extremely difficult to attain their goals. Hence intelligent suggestions on goal tweaking must be suggested to the users who fall way behind their weekly targets.
9. Metrics: Some of the metrics that I would be tracking for this feature are:
- Number of people who have turned on bot
- Number of people who’ve entered height, weight and age details
- DAU
- WAU
- Session Time Per User Per Day
- Sucess % = Weekly Goals Achieved / Weekly Active Users
- Drop off Rate
DAU and WAU are our North Star metrics but they need to be closely inspected along with Session Times and Success % to understand how well the fitness bot is performing.
10. Summary: Fitness Bot on FaceBook iOS/Android app allows users to set fitness goals and advises them how well their exercise and diet are allowing them to reach their goals. The Bot is powered by an AI based image recognition tool which allows the user to upload images of their diet and get feedback on how well they are doing with respect to their weekly targets.

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