CRUSH
An app that help female beginners ditch gymtimidation and form personal training routine.
Role
UX researcher, UI designer
PROBLEM
Gymtimidation is a word that expresses the phenomenon that people have fear of workout in front of other people, especially happened in the beginner female population. It is a severe problem that needs to be solved.
50% of Canadian women suffer from gymtimidation.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/four-ten-40-canadians-intimidated-working-out-gym
-SOLUTION
I designed an App to help female beginners learn about workout knowledge and muscle principles in a more visualized way, and be able to form their own personal training routine.
Let's see how the App works.
Step 1: Generate a training plan based on user info
When onboard, user enter body information and trainning preference, App will make plans based on their information.
Step 2: User follows the plan and experiences to find out what they like while getting more workout knowledge.
There are muscle distribution maps to show their progress, and the trained muscles will be highlighted for one day's training. User marks the motions they like throughout the plan.
Step 3: Users create their personal routine based on previous experience by themselves!
Based on the previous experience, user is able to create their own personal training routine after finishing the plan.
RESEARCH
An overall view of the causes of gymtimidation
Through the survey, we know that the 3 most popular causes for gymtimidation is fear of being judged, don't know what to do at gym and fear of making fool in front of others.
What are their fears?
We can see that it is not the gym itself female beginners are afraid of, what they are really afraid of is how other people see them. People care a lot about other's opinions about themselves. So why do they care that so much? What is the real cause for gymtimidation? To have an answer about that, I interviewed 6 participants in depth, includes male and female.
Define
The causes can be catogorized into cognitive bias and workout knowledge deficiency.
COGNITIVE BIAS
Cognitive bias is that female beginners hold the false thoughts that strength training is for people with good body shape and they don't need to do strength training at this phase.
KNOWLEDGE DEFICIENCY
Workout knowledge deficency is that female beginners lacks lacks knowledge about usage of the equipments, how muscle grows, and form effective personal plans that fit them
Cognitive bias is hard to solved by design, so I focus on workout knowledge deficiency. So I define the problem as
How can I help female beginners overcome workout knowledge deficiency by
1. Helping them master the knowledge of usage of the equipment and of muscle principles.
2. Helping them create effective personal plans that fit them.
User Journey Map
I created a User Journey Map to understand the experience of how a beginner become a pro.
Identify models for target users
What the characteristic of my target user
-DESIGN CONCEPT
Question # 1. How to learn the usage of the equipment and of muscle principles in a effective way?
OLD LINESTREAMED MODEL
At present, female beginners focus more on the relationship between the motion and the effect, they hardly know which muscle they are working on. And they will easily fall into gymtimidation.
NEW GOLDEN NUGGET MODEL
In the new model, the relationship between muscle and effect has been connected. As a result, female beginners will engage in the exercise and not pay more attention to the environment.
Question # 2: How to create effective personal plans that fit them?
1. Activate the whole body muscle groups, try as many motions as possible to have an overall experience.
2. Foucs on the large muscle groups at first, intersperse small mucle groups training gradually.
IDEATION
IDEATION
Features aim to help user create personal training routine
1. Generate a training plan based on user information.
2. Mark the motions they like while getting more knowledge
3. Create a personal routine based on previous experience
Features aim to help user learn the usage of the equipment and of muscle principles in a effective way
1. Use muscle distribution map to hightlight the muscle trained for particupar motion and add video instruction
2. Visualized the effort of trainning using multi-color muscle map
User's flow
Key flow #1
Onboarding - User enters information and preference and a training plan will be generated automatically.
Key flow #2
User starts training following the plan
Key flow #3
User creates personal training plan after finishing the automatically generated plan
-Evaluate
I recruited 4 female participants for the user test and asked them to finish the tasks as follows. After the user test, I conducted a short interview with each of them to talk about their experience and confusion when using the application. Based on the findings, I iterated the wireframes.
Iteration #1
Problem: User found hard to find instruction because motion setting and instruction are in the same page, but these two parts are not relavant.
Solution: Add another segemented control bar to separate setting and instruction
Iteration #2
Problem: User's rountine are put in the motion library which is hard for user to find
Solution: Separated routine with the library by adding a new tab called Routine
Iteration #3
Problem: Traning plan is not clear in the plan page. And the distribution map is not relavant to training plan.
Solution: Separate training plan with muscle data visualization by adding a 'me' tab
-Design system
-Retrospect!
1. Finding a touchable scope is the most important thing. Too big a scope is out of one's control which makes the outcome plain and superficial, too small a scope lacks meaning, the ability of the designer is not well performed.
The most time-consuming thing is to find a topic and narrow down the problem into one sentence. Before crush, I wanted to make a busline reminder in real-time and it turned out to be too wide scope to handle for myself. Current navigators like Baidu or Google have already published this feature using their powering technique, compare with which, I can hardly make something new depending on my ability. So my first brainchild was aborted. I started with what I am familiar with. That is sports! For me, I concluded three ways to avoid it:
1, Start with something not completely new for you.
2, Do enough research of competitive products.
3, Here comes the second idea⬇️
2. Identity the users, the more specific, the better. Make the design satisfy only a small group at first, then fan out.
Female trainers as a group are not specific enough, after research I sorted this group into 4 phases which made my design scope clearer and easier. I only targeted 2 phases as my users so that the pain points were concise and straightforward. Trying to satisfy only a small group of people is a touchable scope that I can deal with. To do that, thorough and deep research is needed, Only I had comprehended the game, I will continue to the next phase.
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