2 weeks
Figma, Xtensio, Miro, Google Forms
Gold’s Gym is a membership-based gym spread across America. Among the hundreds of locations, members of Gold’s Gym in La Mirada in particular have been increasingly complaining about the gym being crammed. The La Mirada location recently had a renovation, thus, has more equipment and is a bit more spacious. Knowing this, members who went to the Fullerton location, especially the high school students, have migrated to the La Mirada location. This transition disrupted the members who regularly attended the La Mirada location, forcing many members to arrive just to go back home and return at another time.
How can we upgrade the Gold’s Gym app to better serve the members?
Empathize => Define => Ideate => Prototype => Test
To start, I first gathered participants to conduct a preliminary survey. I wanted to familiarize myself with the La Mirada Gold's Gym members and their pain points.
I conducted a survey asking 6 participants about their experience as a gym member using a fitness app. Link to Survey
- Regardless of employment status, all participants spent at least 3+ days/week at the gym
- 66.67% of the participants prefer going to the gym later in the day
- Only 1 of the 6 participants used the gym app and expressed technical issues (unable to link account)
Based on my findings, I've created a user persona to represent some of the La Mirada Gold's Gym members. By doing this, I am able to empathize with the target users more closely and better interpret their expectations, concerns, and motivations.
Now that I have a baseline of the gym members, I want to confirm the pain points and identify areas in the app that can be improved so that members could rely on the app.
Using the insights from the survey and user persona, I created a storyboard to illustrate a Gold's Gym member's pain point.
I arranged a few problem statements based on our findings to highlight opportunities for Gold's Gym app to better serve its users.
With a clear understanding of our user's pain points, I began brainstorming solutions.
I generated a few How Might We statements in response to the Problem Statements addressed (above).
After brainstorming ways to eliminate user problems, I created a user journey map to portray the user's experience if we implemented the necessary solutions.
I've designed a screen conceptualizing the app's main page and integrated functional features for the users. The survey responses indicated that the local gym members do not feel much need for a gym app. However, if they were to use the app, the participants expressed that they would want to be able to check in via the app, track their progress/workouts, and be able to check for live updates on the current gym capacity. I've implemented their requests to upgrade the current design of the Gold's Gym app.
I conducted A/B tests juxtaposing the current Gold's Gym home screen with my redesigned sample screen. I sent out the survey to the same participants, as well as, other participants who were not part of the preliminary survey and are not familiar with the Gold's Gym app. I considered that the same participants from the previous survey may recognize the changes applied to the app design based on their comments. Therefore, I added extra participants to offset the potential bias from the preliminary survey participants.
Based on the responses from 18 participants,
- 83.3% would prefer using the redesign version
- 94.4% believed that the redesign successfully resolved the issues and upgraded the app
- 88.9% would find the app useful and want to use it
Due to time limitations, I was not able to make any further iterations of the prototype. Therefore, my next steps would be to apply the feedback that the participants provided and make the necessary iterations. I would also like to explore more of my creativity and design a few more screens to discover more ways to help the app users.
Overall, I think this project was another success because the majority of the participants were satisfied with the outcome. I also thoroughly enjoyed experimenting problem solving with a realistic, personal issue. I felt that I was actually making a positive difference in my surrounding. I was not expecting to receive 18 responses for the follow-up survey, but having more participants in the test definitely gave me a better sense of the prototype's effectiveness. I also felt assured that my prototype had the potential to convert more users.