The ask
Create a seamless, omni-channel fitness solution that “wows” the 80% with a personalized, end-to-end digital experience & drives growth.
The process
Journey mapping
As part of the immersion process, I worked on creating a baseline journey map that integrated all the learnings from user research, stakeholder interviews, strategy, and heuristic analysis.
The map was used to set the ground during the strategic vision workshop and explore the conceptual territories in the context of the service.
Due to the onmi- channel nature of the service, a big part of the mapping was about tracking the different touchpoints both digital and physical to understand the relationship between them and how to leverage those interactions to improve the experience.
The emotion layer was key to identifying the design opportunities r.g. How might we turn around a feeling of being observed and overwhelmed the first time in the gym towards a feeling of being supported?
Finally, given the goal of fitness to motivate behavior change in customers, I used some behavior change frameworks to nurture the layers of the mapping, inspire the design opportunities and bring context to the steps.
Concept development
Based on the immersion results and using the journey as a source of inspiration and framework the team collaborated to design multiple creative territories that through concepts brought to life the goal of evolving Planet Fitness ecosystem and engaging their customers.
These concepts went through multiple iterations and selection through a client workshop before finally landing in user resonance testing. Each conceptual territory had 3 concepts embedded and took care of a specific part of the journey. Also, all the concepts are connected with specific project OKRs.
Here is an overview of where in the customer's journey the concepts belong.
Territory 1: The first steps.
Territory 2: Sticking with it
Territory 3: Your own routine
Territory 4: Work out smarter
Territory 5: Doing it together
Resonance testing
Along with the client the team selected the concepts with the most potential for development. With that in mind, the research team ran a quantitative test to establish which concepts were statistically significant—looking for both positive and negative outliers.
Results
- ‘Guided workouts’ killed it everywhere, with everyone. It’s clearly our top concept.
- ‘Community groups’ was lowest everywhere for everyone.
- ‘Trying it out’ was a strong result for consumers in the consideration phase. This segment is mostly composed of people who belong to a non-PF gym shopping for a gym.
- ‘Celebrating small wins’ resonated with both the “couch” segment and non-frequent gym-goers.
Based on the test results we evolved the designs and started to think about implementation, this meant getting into the details of feature prioritization and Information Architecture
Information Architecture
Goal: By creating a new information architecture (IA) and navigation for the app that focuses on organization, structure, and effective content labeling, we can help users more easily find information and complete tasks such as account management, getting access to workouts, etc.
Information Architecture Audit:
The audit showed the following issues:
- Low utilization of features. Key-tag and crowd-meter were the most popular.
- Content is hidden and not clearly structured to respond to users' expectations.
- Current IA does not respond to different user types —Classic, PF+, and Black Card.
- No clear hierarchy around essential features.
- Content is hidden and not clearly structured to respond to users' expectations.
- Current IA does not respond to different user types —Classic, PF+, and Black Card.
- No clear hierarchy around essential features.
Prioritization workshop
The team run two client-facing workshops, the first one to select the vision concepts with the most potential and the second one to inform the Information Architecture work.
I designed and facilitated the second workshop with a focus on feature prioritization. The goal was to explore with the client two known issues in the ecosystem: the lack of features priority in the current app and the integration of two different types of members, current and prospective.
Prior to the exercise, we provided context on the specific user types with short stories about them and explained the features to be sorted out. We gave stakeholders 5 minutes to rank the features from top value to low value and talk about their decision-making afterward. This prompted a very interesting conversation about what mattered the most to them and helped them align on their vision for the digital ecosystem.
We processed the results in the miro board and based on that defined the key features and started to envision where they could live on the app structure.
Design proposal
I designed two alternative solutions to structure the app content, the main difference being the bottom navigation bar. The first approach had a minimal 3-tab navigation and the second one a 5-tab navigation. This had a repercussion on both the experience and the architecture.
Approach 1
- Simplified navigation bar with 3 navigation sections.
- Home screen as the entry point.
- Perks are dynamic, showing up in different contexts (e.g. gym workouts). Perks will be centralized in the profile.
Approach 2
- More granularity on the bottom nav with 5 main sections
- Multiple entries to content.
- Guided workouts tab, a linear flow to get a personalized suggestion.
- Perks separated.
- Multiple entries to content.
- Guided workouts tab, a linear flow to get a personalized suggestion.
- Perks separated.
Content strategy - Navigation patterns
The client selected the first approach, so we started to design in more detail how would the content be structured, which hierarchy would be given to each piece of content, as well as the main navigation patterns through the app.
Results
The client was so happy about the ecosystem vision project that gave Huge (design agency) an annual retainer of 2millon dollars for the implementation of the concepts, iteration and maintenance of the digital ecosystem
After the implementation of some of the features the engagement in the app increased by 190%
