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My role

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Problems to solve

Our client was a successful Scandinavian fitness club network facing severe and unprecedented dilemmas, as we all were, in the guise of Covid-19. With their club locations shuttered for long periods, they urgently needed a new digital channel to their customers.

Beyond the immediate need to reconnect with gym-starved members, the company's CEO had an ambitious vision of the future that extended well beyond the lock-downs. He wanted to explore new digital experiences that would cater to emerging modern lifestyles, and connect his well-respected club instructors to new markets outside of Scandinavia. He needed help to expand the core fitness offering to an ecosystem of connected products.

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Approach

Almost every aspect of the project was dictated by the pandemic and the peculiarities of working remotely. The urgency of the client's need led us to assemble a globally distributed team, in Australia, Sweden and the US, that could essentially work around the clock. In this way, we were disjointed temporally as well as spatially.

Following the CEO's direction, our goals were two-fold: firstly, the "roof shot" giving gym junkies simple and immediate access to the routines they had been missing out on, and secondly the "moon shot", giving people a fitness experience they had never encountered before.

The abiding challenge throughout was to create something warm and inviting in a context where we were mostly staring at screens in isolation and the human dimension was basically absent.

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Customer research

Tools for conducting research remotely have come a long way. But I knew that our inability to spend time talking directly to people would leave some major blind spots. To address this, I decided that it was important to over-index on research and prioritise a mixed methods approach. The pre-launch generative work was done with quantitative data from Pollfish, complemented by qualitative data from dscout (interviews and diary studies). This approach enabled us to understand what was happening, by unpacking both behavioural and attitudinal data, the what; and begin the process of understanding the why.

I combined moderated customer interviews for the research foundation with rapid, iterative diary studies for the conceptual refinement work. I started in a single market to get a pulse check, then refined the research design and launched in more markets (Germany, France, U.K., U.S.) to add international scale and rigour.

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Synthesis and insights

I did affinity mapping in Miro with transcribed statements from surveys, interviews and diary studies. After clustering, I organised the groupings into themes with actionable insights and implications.

Affinity mapping to detect patterns in customer data

Some of the most interesting insights related to the social dimension of visiting the gym. Some customers were really missing the opportunity to see and be motivated by their gym buddies. But there were other, less hard-core individuals who were interested in the benefits of the gym -- but self-conscious about their appearance and fitness level. These people were in the market for a different kind of gym experience.

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Difficulties

The pace at which this project moved prompted regular dilemmas about how to balance speed with integrity. The temptation to cut corners was always there. It was difficult to know which corners hid camouflaged speed bumps that would send us careening into a ditch.

I developed a set of "red lines" that the design team could not compromise on. For example, a minimum of one day per designer per two-week sprint dedicated to user testing and analysis. Similarly, one day per sprint for codifying new components and adding them to the library.

In the circumstances, I wanted to make sure that the team was thinking about its mental health, as well as its physical fitness. I scheduled regular down-time and organised get-to-know you activities. The most successful of these involved the team photographing the most unusual objects in their houses, uploading them to a shared folder, then trying to guess who the objects belonged to. Living in Melbourne, by several measures the most locked-down city in the world, had given me plenty of practice with this kind of thing.

Customer value proposition analysis in relation to membership tiers.

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iPad UI sketches

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The roof shot

Following the customer research phase, my main responsibility was leading the execution of design work for iOS and Android mobile apps. I produced low-fidelity device-agnostic designs, then focused on detailed designs for iOS while the UI designer produced Android versions.
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We came together with the broader team for regular design critique sessions and to plan user testing. Tools like Maze were invaluable in the circumstances, and we continued to invest a lot of time learning from customers, knowing that we were inevitably missing out on the subtler insights from in-person testing.

We managed to keep a sprint ahead of the engineers, although this became more difficult when we had to wait for the video training content to be recorded and edited. As always, the spice must flow, and by making some strategic assumptions about the video specs, we were able to maintain velocity and keep the engineers fed.

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The moon shot

Everyone on the team was adjusting to the realities of the post-C19 world, and thinking very differently about being at home. We began considering ways that people could get access to the feeling of being right there in the gym with their instructors, but in the comfort of their own homes.

Collective ideation sessions led us towards experiences that were immersive, but didn't require bulky VR or AR equipment that would interfere with freedom of movement. Taking inspiration from my Samsung Frame TV that doubles as framed artworks, we converged on the idea of a mirror that is also a touchscreen and virtual window into the gym. This window opened on to life-size video recordings of well-known instructors.

The physical product team was in Scandinavia, so I played the remote art director role steering the work of the local UI designer and providing governance on the consistency of work across hemispheres. Because of the separation of team members, there was a constant influx of inconsistencies that I was obliged to stamp on mercilessly. My role transitioned from wire-framing to managing the emerging design system that united the vision for the product ecosystem.
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The main dilemma for me with this part of the work was that in-person testing was still problematic because of Covid restrictions. This was a major concern for a physical product that was new to the market. Services like Maze and usertesting.com are not particularly helpful with new product form factors like the one we were developing. I recommended that the team set up some hybrid/guerilla testing by installing the mirror prototype in an isolated room with a video conference link, allowing friends and colleagues to come in and act as guinea pigs. (Necessity, as always, the mother of invention -- and Melbourne lockdown experience the father.)

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This testing helped the team to understand that the speakers were placed too low and weren't high-quality enough. It also revealed that we had placed some UI controls too high or too low on the screen to interact with comfortably while working out. Fixing these problems before the next round of testing gave us a steeply improving trajectory towards high levels of user satisfaction and engagement.

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Impact

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Lessons learned

A team resembling the British Empire (ie. that the "sun never sets upon") brought with it both blessings and curses. There were times when the whole thing was fairly seamless — the people based in Australia would finish up work for the day and then pass it to people in Europe and North America to review. We had daily stand-up / hand-over videos conferences that gave us a tight feedback loop and sense of velocity.

But there were other times when the orchestration broke down and we lost touch with what people in the other time zones were doing. This was responsible for some significant confusion and re-work at times.

Because of the extreme time pressure, we sometimes skipped team retros, which (of course) ended up being a false economy.

In many ways, the team dynamic was a super-charged version of the remote and hybrid ways of working that many of us are still figuring out.

It's difficult to assess whether or not the round-the-clock operations allowed us to work faster and better overall. As with many other decisions made during the pandemic, we did what seemed best at the time -- without a scientific control group that would allow conclusive comparisons.
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