Getting Down to the Core

Making a clear customer journey

Having been a member at several gyms, I found myself still looking for the ultimate gym app. The lastest gym I joined, a national-wide service with millions of members and billboards all across London, had one of the most frustrating apps I’ve come across so far.

My Role: Sketching & prototyping. Mock-up

Timeline: 48 hours

Challenge:  Understand what makes and breaks the gym app.

High Level Goals: Uncover how to alleviate friction in user experience. Re-designing an app for the user and the gym, filling the classes they have.

1. Objective: Increase the usage of the app, the maintaining of clients, and exploration of what they offer.

2. Platforms: Sketch, Craft & Invision

3. Target Audience:

The Experienced: want i to be easy to make bokings and oversee the timetable

The Explorer: want to try new things, but need help finding it

The Unexpected: never know when they will have time to go. Need last minutes options

4. Deliverables: I boiled it down to three items I wanted to create and improve:

– Bring it back to the core of usage: booking classes/courts

– Fill up the spots in the empty classes

– Easy access to info of the centre

– Create a explore feed for people looking to try new things

1. Sketching Wireframe

First, I sketched up the wireframe in Freehand in Invision. Se full version here: https://projects.invisionapp.com/freehand/document/Y6fykd4LX

This to make sure the appearance was cohesive and that all essential screens were included. This way, we could also make sure the user journey was logical and easy to follow.

 

2. Building Prototype

Then began the prototyping. Since this project was more reliant on personal preferences and experience, I included the testing of the prototype on friends to make sure it was a universal understanding of how to use it. I used Sketch and Invision to create the custoemr journet, and added more overlay options such as the all the bookings and opening hours and centre information for easy access, without being the center of attention of the app.

The importance was to create opitons for the three needs I had found in my research; the easy booking to for the Experienced, the ability to explore for the Explorer and the last minute bookings for the Unexpected.

See full prototype on my Invision profile here: https://invis.io/REVVHZKPHT6

 

3. Layout

The colour scheme and graphic profile was created to make the app as calm as possible, with splashes of yellow for highlights. Other gym apps we came across in our brainstorming were often bright colours and low contrasts which we found to make it harder to navigate. The font were chosen based on its big and round letters, making it easy to read, in all sizes.

We did consider a menubar to have complete control of where to go at all times, but the focus was kept on making it a clear and simple jounrey for the user. The information needed can instead only be found on the homescreen, so the user focus on one thing at a time.

The choice-wheel was something we found similar in the brainstorming, looking at other app layouts. It inspired for the easiness to use and enabling to present multiple categories and dates, as well as both left and right-handed people could use.

4. Conclusion

I was very pleased with this project, even though we lacked extensive research and time, the result was pleasing. To develop this project, I would love to have more time to try out the colourscheme and include more testing. This way, I think we could come up with even more aspects of a gym app to please even more users. I always enjoy working in Sketch and Invision, but if given more time, I would love to try the app out in Axure, Proto.io and similar softwares.