The design challenge was to create an innovative digital product for a boutique fitness studio that would keep members engaged in both in-person and digital experiences.
Our final product helps users build healthy habits by offering personalized and flexible experiences that empower them to establish and maintain routines that work for their lifestyle and goals.
Our preliminary research has identified several key challenges fitness facilities are facing, including:
Given these challenges, fitness studios need to rethink their offerings to provide customers with comprehensive wellness experiences that meet their needs and promote sustainable healthy habits.
The app focuses on facilitating habit building through creating personalized and flexible experiences. Key features include:
We first did preliminary research on:
The preliminary research aimed to better understand the challenge at hand and guide the focus for the upcoming interviews.
After that, we conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with health-conscious working adults, who aged 26-40 in the GTA region and have not yet achieved their wellness goals.
view research planThe goals for our research were:
After the interviews, we coded the interview content to identify common themes.
After synthesizing the content gathered from the semi-structured interviews, we uncovered valuable insights that shed light on our research questions and provided a deeper understanding of our target audience.
.png)
.png)
.png)
Participants expressed various motivations for maintaining their holistic well-being, including:
Participants were drawn to virtual sessions because:
Participants were drawn to in-person sessions because:
.png)
As we delved into participants' perspectives on wellness definitions and self-care routines, we discovered different viewpoints. It became clear that our app needed to provide a more tailored experience and broaden our offerings. However, three common themes emerged:
Through consolidating the findings from preliminary research and interviews, we crafted 4 diverse personas that represent our targeted demographic.
Drawing upon the insights gained from research, we engaged in collaborative brainstorming sessions to generate high-level ideas. This served as the foundation for developing user flows and sketching subsequently.
We prioritized our ideas to focus on 4 essential pillars - scheduling, personalization, habit building and social experience.
We individually created distinct user flows and later engaged in a group discussion to compare and analyze them. During the session, we reviewed all flows sequentially and identified key elements to integrate into a single user flow.
Initially, the app featured four tabs - calendar (homepage), explore, profile, and community. However, based on feedback from the industry partner and users, we made slight adjustments, including adding a dashboard as the homepage with the user profile embedded within it, while maintaining the overall structure.
I explored how our app can help address the pain points and meet the needs of the persona “the burnout dad”.
At this stage, I contributed in discussion on the overall app flow and focused on developing these aspects of the app:
We developed our ideas into a mid-fidelity prototype so that we could receive feedback from the industry partner and conduct testing on the initial concept and interactions. We all participated in the discussion of iterating our ideas, but I was mainly responsible for creating the following flows:
For the first round of tests, we recruited 4 participants on UserTesting.com, using structured tasks on our mid-fidelity prototype. We tested on 5 flows:
Our goal was to gather feedback on the initial design concept and gain insight into how users might engage with specific features and functionalities of the product. This included assessing whether the product is user-friendly and intuitive and identifying areas where improvements can be made.
We proceeded to analyze the feedback provided by the participants and employed the MoSCoW Method (must have, should have, could have, and won't have) to prioritize our next steps.
Positive Feedback:
Overall, the participants appreciated the app's holistic approach. They expressed particular interest in features such as goal-setting, attending sessions with friends, exploring trainer profiles, and the concept of AI journaling.
Negative Feedback:
While there were no major functionality issues, we did identify minor concerns such as a cluttered confirmation page that requires refinement.
Conflicting Views:
Participants held conflicting views on certain aspects, notably customizing routines within programs, navigating past journal entries, and the concept and interactions related to mood analysis.
After refining the flows, we proceeded with another round of testing on the high-fidelity prototype. We focused on testing the new and refined flows while taking out ones we were already confident in. The specific flows we tested included:
Due to time constraints, we were only able to complete 2 tests, which limited the amount of feedback received. However, we did not encounter any major issues or concerns in these 2 tests.
Based on the feedback from our professors, the industry partner and the testing participants, we iterated our designs accordingly. Major changes include:
While we all collaboratively discussed the iterations, I was responsible for refining the customizing program process and refining the journaling session.
To streamline the customization process for our program page, I made a few iterations:
Another change that I made was to allow users to select sessions by tapping on the entire session card for easier selections. I also added a small icon on the right of the session card for accessing session details to help with decision making.
I added a microphone icon to the control panel to indicate the interaction of voice input during the journaling session. I also kept all control elements at the bottom of the screen to reduce distractions, allow for more immersive participation in the conversation, and easier access to the control elements of the session.
We decided to go for a friendly approach because we wanted to make the user feel at ease and make following and achieving goals something fun and inviting, rather than challenging. We chose Apertura for its more “rounded”, playful style and its simple, readable typeface. To complement this playful nature, we incorporated fun illustrations with a mixture of pastel and bright colours.
We created a mood-board collaboratively to determine the direction of the visual style before creating the style kit. Our team member Brooks helped set up the style kit before we applied the style to the mid-fidelity prototype to ensure consistency.
For the high-fidelity prototype, I focused on these 2 flows:
Feel free to check out the different flows of our high-fid prototype! :)
I am happy with what we were able to create within such a short time. Meeting the requirements given by the industry partner was certainly challenging, but we worked hard to combine our many ideas cohesively to deliver a product that emphasized holistic well-being.
In the future, I am interested to explore and create new additions to the app that have the potential to enhance the overall experience, such as:
Collaborating with this team has been a great experience. I appreciate how open everyone was to different perspectives and ideas, which led to a smooth collaboration process. Additionally, the diverse strengths and expertise among team members contributed to significant progress and improvements in our designs, after engaging in constructive discussions.
