Helping users find personal trainers
Introduction
A quick thinking project
Everyone’s fitness goals are different and having access to loads of information with a single Google can often lead down long paths that offer no results. Fitness trainers, although not for everyone, are key to helping different people with varying body types achieve their goals. But it can be hard to find the right person in a location that suits.
People struggle with a few things, part of this could be making it a habit, another is time, while some just don’t know where to start…etc, etc. For this project I will be focusing on the latter as a primary test point, to find the connection between clients and the fitness trainer.
For the concept app ‘Sanitas’ I will be looking at creating an experience that is valuable for both client and trainer. Although I will be diving deeper into solutionising the client side trying to make sure it works from a usability point of view, but always making considerations into the professional trainer side of the product.
Looking at the process for this mini thinking project I divided the process up into the following structure to best show my rationale.
- Problem
- Approach
- Solution
- Learning
Problem
“I need to find a fitness professional that will help me live a healthier & fitter lifestyle. So that I can feel better about my body and health.”
Sanitas is a fitness application aiming to help users find a fitness profession/trainer, and achieve their goals through key collaboration. While also having a secondary use case of trainers finding clients.
Approach
I began with pulling together some assumptions to help guide the project. I would have liked to do further research but time and budget were key factors, the research done helped move the idea forward, and guide some key aspects of the concept.
Assumptions
Base assumptions on why someone will look to get a personal trainer
- Physical appearance
- Get stronger
- Live a healthier lifestyle
Base assumptions on why they dont use a personal trainer
- Cost in too high — or they think it will be high!
- Not sure if it’s for them
- Don’t want to commit to a gym every week or day
- Struggle to find someone in their local area
Insights
The main goal of this form was to learn and validate why users aim to get fit or think of using a fitness trainer. This allowed me to create some hypotheses to help form the base thinking for the product.
What are the users looking for
I first set out to look at how we might help connect personal trainers & clients. Looking into the customer segmentation of ‘client’ vs ‘personal trainer’ and what each user base is looking for in a fitness application.
Users are looking to use such a product for a variety of reasons; get in shape, lose weight, eat healthier, find a trainer, get stronger. But the main reasons for not choosing to use a fitness trainer is because of commitment to a long term plan, or the cost, and location. But the one key aspect is they want to feel connected like they can ask an actual human a question.
Use Cases
- Measure Health details
- Find a trainer
- Contact my Trainer
- Find quick workouts
- Calorie intake and Macros (Later feature)
- Recipes
- Diet plans
Getting in a users mindset
It was time to build a few user personas to help me focus on the people I was designing for. Along with an empath map to help guide my thinking and considerations.
Ideation
Now I had all the initial thinking, it was time to reframe the problems into How Might We’s to help me find some key areas to look into for this mini project, this enabled me to gather some quick ideas and be enabling me to ideate much quicker as well as removing an ideas that just don’t seem like they would work right now but keeping them for later.
Sketching ideas from the HMW allowed me to explore ideas quickly, along with testing some working hypotheses. Ultimately testing many versions before landing on a direction to go in.
User Journeys
To make sure I understand the context of the user within the flow I created a set of scenarios and user journeys to help guide my thinking.
As a user I want to find a trainer at their local gym, and book a session…
From these key journeys I could begin to build a draft product flow that could be built upon later, the main reason for this is to understand how the user navigates through the application, from one page to another, along with detailing what data we would need to store for each user such as; metrics, contact, address, billing, dietary requirements, etc…
I then began to take the journeys and pull together wireframes to help decide what content and information needed to go where, to make the product as easy to use as possible.
Solution
Draft MVP product flow, this would adapt as the product gets built and tested but in this case it served as a key part of the documentation to help figure out the navigation of the core product.
I set out to focus on two key flows: onboarding and finding a trainer, these both happen within the first couple of times the user opens the application.
The first flow was finding a fitness trainer which appears as soon as the user has created an account, this gives the user a chance to explore various trainers in their area to find someone that is for them. It’s a fairly simple solution where the user can easily navigate through a selection process, with varying options along the way depending on what they need, and want from a fitness professional. They can decide to search by location, or just see nearby trainers.
Onboarding was another section I decided to look at, from the homescreen the user is asked to complete the onboarding if they haven’t already, this would also allow the user to fill in any necessary documents if needed such as allergies or goals etc. It needed to be clear, one question per screen, to feel quick and easy!
As an addition I also looked at a future feature that would allow a user to see fitness videos trainers have published, relevant to their fitness program — the trainer can assign weekly workouts to each client to make sure they are targeting the correct muscles groups etc.
Learnings
This was only a short exploration/thinking exercise and I would have loved to test and go into more depth, testing along with features such as;
- Conversations
- Metric tracking
- Meal Planning
- How we could use an algorithms to suggest meal plans
- Personal trainer flows, such as a dashboard, and client management.
Testing and validation is key to iteration, and this should be at the core of any project to get to the correct solution for the user. I had to make a few assumptions on this project due to the lack of data available but I would love to dive deeper into the challenge.
The product should help both clients and personal trainers, this flexibility means the product would have a different primary use case for user type. One helps find and keep in contact with a large number of clients, and another allows someone to find a trainer and keep healthy.
