SugarWOD
How might we reimagine an existing fitness application to provide an experience around minimal equipment, investment, and time?
Introduction
Overview
SugarWOD is a workout app for athletes, coaches, and affiliates.
Over 500,000 affiliate athletes use SugarWOD to track their workouts and PRs! With commenting, photo sharing, and community scoreboards, you can connect with friends and coaches inside and outside the gym. Athletes have even given each other more than 35 million fist bumps! The app also creates a better WOD experience with performance tracking, movement prep videos, and a way for your friends to support you when you get that back squat PR.
My contributions
As part of an interaction design course at Kent State University, my focus was to apply methods taught in the curriculum to propose critical recommendations. I strategized a research plan, led ideation, and prototyped to communicate detailed design for enhancements to an existing mobile application.
Key user research deliverables: content analysis, competitor analysis, sitemap, wireframes, prototypes, visual design
Timeline
2-weeks
Role
M.S. User Experience Design Candidate
Problem
Gyms can be expensive, crowded, limited, and time-consuming if you need to wait for equipment to become available. There are a variety of fitness applications, and while the majority require a paid subscription, all apps require a certain amount of equipment to accommodate most fitness programs.
What would a fitness application look like if we could capture fitness equipment users may have to accommodate and narrow what type of workouts they can do with what they have?
Goals
01
Discovery
What are some key opportunities we can explore to enhance our user experience from competitors?
Who are our users and what are their unmet needs?
02
Analysis
Evaluate competitor and current existing experiences to determine value proposition.
What are our opportunities?
03
Ideation
How might we leverage user insights to inform design recommendations for a future vision design?
What would enhancements look like in our experience?
Constraints
Critical
Fictional project with no research budget.
Budget impacted research tools and recruiting efforts for participants. Participant recruiting was limited to individuals in my social ecosystem. I worked with free trials of research tools (with limited capabilities) to conduct tree sort and click-tests.
Research
I conducted competitor analysis across Beyond the Whiteboard, BodySpace, and Garage Gym to generate a list of features currently available.
By becoming aware of baseline capabilities, I sought to understand their app value proposition, fitness analytics, community engagement, and fitness tracking capabilities to find opportunities to integrate with SugarWOD.
Recurring themes
- Subscription Service
- Social Community
- Accountability
- Analytics
- Tracking
- Gamification
- Equipment oriented
- Standalone web experience
Findings
- All fitness apps assumed equipment availability equivalent to traditional gym environments rather than home gym setups.
- Fitness community features to promote accountability.
- Data analytics is standard across three fitness apps assessed as third-party services to independent fitness programs.
- Fitness apps were all cross-platform browser-based and encouraged installing the mobile apps.
- PayPal, iOS native app store, and direct card payment are mixed transaction processes for subscription services.
Recommendations
- Competitive advantage — How might we reimagine an existing application and provide an experience that revolves around minimal equipment, investment, and time?
- Personalization — How might we leverage tags to personalize experiences and keep users engaged and motivated?
- Access management — How might we streamline sign-on for returning customers and onboard first time users?
- Subscription services — How might we opt-in and out of new and existing subscriptions?
User insights
Mapping the experience
User Persona
Paul Fitness
"I don't always have access to a gym and look to maintain personalized workouts for maximum results."
About
Paul travels for work and is often trying to find ways to stay active and be able to track his fitness. While his primary gym uses SugarWOD to track his workouts, he would like more guidance with finding motivation when traveling.
Goals
- To share what equipment or space he can workout in
- To be able to set a timeframe for which he can workout, perhaps a target heart rate
- To not need to use yet another application to track his workouts
Activities
- Workouts 4-5 times a week
Workouts are a blend of - CrossFit and strength body building
- Travels for work every other week
Frustrations
- Not being able to modify his workouts with other movements or equipment
- Not knowing where to go to create custom workouts
- Not knowing where he needs to improve his strength in benchmarks
Solution
Program filtering
How might we integrate advanced filtering options for finding workout programs in the current experience?
Tailored programs
What level of information do we need to capture to populate program options based on fitness users’ criteria?
Key screens
Workout filter
Search by track, equipment or available time
Program questionnaire
Dynamically capture information based on responses
Community
Enhance visual style for app and web unification
Profile dashboard
Activity at a glance
Manage account
Billing and user preferences
Subscription
Update subscription preferences
Reflection
While this ultimately felt like a great visual design exercise, I couldn’t genuinely solve unmet user problems as I had limited time to conduct formal research.
If I were to pursue this exercise, I would:
Next steps
- Focus more on user-centricity, research, analysis, and design ideation before committing to visual design without user input