Dancebit
Dancebit is a mobile app that turns quick dance workouts into a fun, habit-forming fitness ritual you’ll actually want to come back to
Dancebit
Dancebit is a mobile app that turns quick dance workouts into a fun, habit-forming fitness ritual you’ll actually want to come back to
Dancebit
Dancebit is a mobile app that turns quick dance workouts into a fun, habit-forming fitness ritual you’ll actually want to come back to
Context
💃 Dancebit is a fitness app with short dance workouts with the core idea of fun weight loss (MAU 40k+, monthly revenie 200k+)
I've joined the Dancebit team as a sole Product Designer when product was already blooming, having millions of users across iOS and Android. I must say I got lucky with the team where I had a freedom and the free will to do what I see right.
Like most dating platforms, it faces a structural imbalance: there are significantly more male users than female users. As a result, many men get very few profile views, matches, or replies. Over time, this leads to frustration, self-doubt, and disengagement.
Boost was introduced to address this reality — not by promising better outcomes, but by offering more visibility at moments when users feel invisible.
My responsibilities were:
all product design in the app (new features, improvements of the existing features, redesign elements, eliminating imperfections, building design system, getting new content, etc)
monetization features (onboardings, paywalls, special offers, web funnels)
animations and prototypes
researches in collaboration with Product manager and UX researche
art direction of the content (dance videos)
Features I've worked on:
First session improvement
Gamification
Personalized challenges
Live classes
Social engagement
Retention after the first workout
Streaming
Add ons (paid meal plans)
Onboardings and paywals, inc. onboardogn after web funnel, onboarding for China region
Case Study Live Classes
Live Classes is a time limited scheduled social activity. It's basically a live dance class that happens a few limes a day, has a schedule and enroll system that shows how many other users participate.
Hypotheses
For users trying to lose weight, staying consistent with workouts is difficult. They need additional motivation and commitment to keep going
💡
Create time-limited, scheduled dance events where users feel part of a community rather than dancing alone at home
To hypothesize the potential impact and value of the feature, we built our idea around three psychological principles:
Temporality
The class is available for a limited timeSocial presence
Users feel that other people are participating at the same timeAnticipation
Users don’t immediately start exercising — they enter a waiting room and anticipate the upcoming class
Goals
Business goals:
Increase retention
Increase MAU
Improve product stickiness (>1 sessions for a user a day)
Increase time spent in the app
More value to come back for
-> higher LTV
Research
First, I looked at our existing user data to set a baseline and define the metrics we wanted to improve. I looked at R1, R3 and R28 retention, average dance sessions per user per day, daily time spent in the app, and daily workout time.
I already knew most users weren’t doing dance workouts every day. We were already working on this through other features, such as gamification and personalized challenges. Live Classes gave us another way to encourage users to come back and work out more often.
Where I looked for insights:
Competitors analysis
Checked out our main competitors at the time and analyzed how they used social features in their products. One of them, Seven, already had a similar live workout experience, which gave me more confidence that the concept could work for Dancebit too.
Reddit
Looked through Reddit discussions about why people struggle to work out or lose weight. I found several comments from people saying that working out alone makes it harder to stay motivated. This supported the idea that adding a social element could give users an extra reason to show up.
Dancebit and competitors reviews
I reviewed 100+ App Store reviews, looking for recurring themes around motivation, boredom and social interaction. I also reached out to our Support team to learn more from user requests. A few users had asked how they could dance with their friends, which was another signal that there was interest in a more social workout experience.
Key Research Insights
People would feel more motivated knowing they are working out with somebody
One of the competitors uses live classes that proves this concept worth efforts
Design
Once I had all the information, I defined the feature scope. I focused on what we needed to include in the first version to test the concept, and what could be added later if we saw positive results. The goal was to keep the MVP simple and avoid building a large, complicated feature before we knew it worked.
Feature MVP scope:
Feature introduction (banner)
Entry point on the main screen
Live classes screen with info/waiting room
Live events schedule
Live events in Classes (2nd entry point)
Reminders
Player screen
Result screen
Got kicked out of scope
Chat screen with reactions (moderation)
added in the app later
Video with other participants (low confidelity, high effort)
Special content (high effort)
First user flow
Onboarding - > First session - > Get back to main screen -> First live event starts in 2 minutes
Design
Live events schedule
Scheduled Live Classes weren’t part of the initial MVP scope. While working on the feature, I started thinking about how this experience would actually fit into users’ everyday routines.
One thing didn’t feel right to me: having a random live class appear when a user opens the app. If the next class started in 30 minutes (like in Seven) why would someone who came to work out right now wait that long?
I felt the experience would work better if users knew about upcoming classes in advance and could plan around them. This also gave us an opportunity to make the class feel more like an event — something you can look forward to and show up for, rather than just another workout option.
💡
For the live experience to become a habit-forming moment, users needed predictability: they should know when classes were happening and be able to plan around them
So I proposed making Live Classes scheduled and predictable, while keeping the time-limited and social aspects of the experience.
Outcome
I left the product before the full testing period was completed, so I don’t have the final numbers or enough data to quantify the feature’s direct impact on retention or LTV.
However, early proxy metrics showed increased workout frequency among users who joined Live Classes, suggesting stronger engagement with the product.
Three years later, the feature is still part of Dancebit and survived a major product redesign. For me, this is a meaningful signal that the idea proved valuable enough to become a lasting part of the evolving product, even without a precise long-term impact measurement.
3+ years in product
Survived a major redesign
Still part of the core experience, staying unchanged
Retrospective
Lessons
I learned to think about how a feature fits into users’ real routines, not just how it works inside the app. This is what made me question the idea of random Live Classes and move towards scheduled sessions.
What I'd do differently
I would do in-depth interviews with Dancebit users or users of similar fitness apps to validate the main hypothesis behind Live Classes before production. I’d ask what keeps them motivated, why they skip workouts, and whether a set time and others joining would make them more likely to work out. This would help me understand if the idea solves a real user problem before investing more time in the feature.
Tradeoffs
One of the tradeoffs was deciding how to produce the content for the first Live Classes test. We initially considered recording a separate set of workouts in a dedicated studio to make the experience feel more like a true live class.
However, that would have added significant production time and complexity before we knew whether the concept itself worked. For the first test, we decided to use the existing workout videos already available in the app.
This allowed us to validate the Live Classes experience itself — scheduled sessions, the waiting room and the sense of joining a class together — without investing in new content production upfront.