Launching guided fitness programs
Background
Core is a fitness startup incubated by AlleyCorp. They are on a mission to make it easy for any fitness professional to manage their business and create a digital offering for their students.
The Goal
Fitness instructors want to offer day-by-day guided fitness programs but don't have the tools do it.
My Role
I led design for both the student and instructor experiences across iOS and web. I interviewed clients, collaborated with tech and product to identify requirements and launch this new feature.
Instructors don't have the tools they need to build fitness programs
Example 1: sculpt society
Megan Roup is a popular fitness instructor with a great video-on-demand subscription business. Even as a top tier digital-first instructor, she was offering students interested in her program a pdf of a calendar with the titles of Vimeo videos on it for them to follow along with. We think this experience can be improved upon.
Example 2: gymhooky
"I use 3 main platforms - PTDistinction, Vimeo, and Facebook… oh and Calendly... and Pinterest."
Example 2: rip then rock
"I shoot the video at home, upload it to Teachable, send it out via MailChimp, and my clients use MyPTHub synched with Fitbit or Apple Watch."
Instructor Portal: Building the Program
Programs are a great way for insturctors to re-use existing content and keep students engaged. It was important to make the CMS experience of building a program straight-forward so that our users could easily take advantage of the feature.
Balancing flexibility with a guided user experience
The instructors we were working with had a variety of differnet formats for their programs. Some were based on weeks and some were divided into sections that didn't necessarily follow a 7 day cycle. In our first build we allowed for as much flexibility as possible, but after some user testing we found that we were giving users too much freedom and not clear enough guidance on how to structure Programs.
Keeping it fitness specific
Letting your body recover is an important part of long term fitness programs. One of the more fitness-specific elements of Core programs is the ability to mark days in the cycle as Rest Days for students to mark off.
Iterating post-launch
Programs offer students a more holistic and guided fitness experience. Many instructors wanted to attach additional resources to their program such as nutrition plans. As a fast follow to our initial launch, we added the ability for instructors to add both links and attachments.
After interviewing multiple instructors, we learned that most of them treat programs as a separate offering from their subscription business, either using it to funnel in new students or as an add on for subscribers. Our next iteration of programs would iclude the ability to have a one-off price.
