Examining the impacts of fitness app features on user well-being

Abstract

Drawing on the self-regulation theory, the current paper explores the impacts of two types of fitness app feature sets (i.e., personal-oriented and social-oriented features) on users’ health behavior and well-being. The results from fitness app users show that both personal-oriented features and social-oriented features of fitness apps can significantly improve exercise adherence and social engagement of users. Users’ exercise proficiency level negatively moderates the relationship between social-oriented features and (a) exercise adherence and (b) social engagement. High levels of social engagement promote users’ physical adherence to exercises. Exercise adherence and social engagement both enhance users’ subjective well-being, but their impacts on different dimensions of well-being vary. Furthermore, regardless of specific features, sufficient use of fitness apps, in general, can significantly help users lead more positive and healthier lives by maintaining exercise adherence, reducing emotional exhaustion, and improving their satisfaction with the overall quality of life. Our findings offer important insights into the underlying mechanisms that help explain fitness app features on users’ well-being, and on a practical level, provide suggestions for mobile app developers in designing better fitness app products and for exercisers in optimizing the benefits of fitness technology adoption.