Gympair
Gympair is a Web App design group project based in Taiwan for people to increase the motivation of exercising regularly by finding a sports partner. The project collaborated with a group of engineers, PM and designers.
Project Duration:
Oct.2020-Oct.2021 (1 year)
My role:
01. Overview
Nowadays, exercise has become the trend in society. More and more people recognize that working out regularly is the way to stay healthier. As more gyms and sport centers have been built all over the world, the project will focus on exploring the motivation for people to keep exercising. Besides, to investigate the key elements for people to keep the habit of exercising instead of one time trying.
When we started doing some research, we asked people “what makes you start exercising” and ” what makes you keep going?” A lot of them said that they would go with a friend first. In the meantime, they will be able to meet more friends with the same hobbies. This is when they start to build the commitment of exercising. Therefore, partners play an important role in this situation. Besides, according to the research, 95 % of those who started a weight-loss program with friends completed the program. Those who exercised with a more-capable partner increased their plank time by 24%. So what can people do if they want to exercise but couldn’t find a partner?
02. Competitive Audit
Currently, there are some sports brands that contributed in this area. The most common features that we can see are:
- Help users to connect with coaches in different sports
- Create a community for people to join (e.g. participating in challenges, connecting with friends)
- Provide different exercising sessions online for members to follow
How about bridging people with interests in the same sports? From here, we define our how might we question and the quantity research to test out our idea.
HOW MIGHT WE
Help 18 to 35 year old people who are interested in exercising to find a partner to exercise together
03. User Research
We conducted a research online to see if people prefer to find a partner who has the same goal for exercising.
Our team collected 192 people aged 18 to 35, including people who have experience of exercising in a group and individuals who can’t find a partner to work together with.
04. Hierarchy
According to the diagram below, we are able to understand what is the most important feature that our users expect to see in the app. Therefore, we decided to focus on developing the app to help people match with the sporty partners.
05. Persona & User Journey Map
Jennifer (25)
Jennifer is a busy working manager who find herself get a lot of red marks on the health check report. Therefore, she planned a schedule for exercising in the free time. Recently, Jennifer considered to start some strength training in the gym. Nevertheless, she doesn’t have the budget to hire the coach. It is confirmed that the effective way for Jennifer is to find a partner who can help and encourage each other in the gym.
Goals
A. Cultivate the habit of training in the gym regularly.
B. Find a partner to share the information and motivate each other.
Frustrations
A. Cultivate the habit of training in the gym regularly.
B. Find a partner to share the information and motivate each other.
I have no idea how to start training in the gym so I tend to find a partner who can teach me some basic knowledge of muscle training.
06. User flow & Wireframe
07. Design Guideline
08. Usability Test
Each designer of the team did an unmoderated test with a user and came out with several feedbacks. Since it was in the first-time development phase, we needed to figure out the most important feedbacks and put them into the iteration process. There are three important points to improve in this stage:
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Firstly, the pairing mechanism. Users get confused about when they will become friends with their sports partners. There were no notifications about if the connection was made, nor guides of how to make a connection.
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Secondly, the time that users pair up. When introducing the app to users, we should inform them of the procedures and timings from the registration step to the pairing step (since they won’t be paired straight after registration and they need to wait until midnight to pair successfully).
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Thirdly, the confusion of users while waiting for procedures to complete. When users are waiting for the pages to load after clicking the submit button (which may take a couple more mins), they will be confused whether it is crushed or just loading slowly. Therefore, loading icons and pop-up messages are needed to let users understand what happened, and to increase the clarity in delivering instructions and the next steps.
09. Final Product
Tutorial
We provide the tutorial for the first time entry which help the users quickly realize how to make friends through the APP
Personal information
Through the survey, we realize what kind of features that users will focus on while matching with others. Therefore, we create the list for them to fill up. In addition, the system will help them find the most compatible partners based on the form.
Avoid over-swiping & Priority information
Users need to wait until midnight to match for five other active users because we want to via this way to prevent people from swiping and making friends with plenty of partners but not sincerely want to open a conversation.
We put the countdown at the top of the screen which can remind people don’t hesitate to open conversation or the capable partners will disappear and never appear again in the future.
Due to our research, we will design our algorithms based on the features that users value for, so we can make sure to let users find a compatible partners in the short time. In addition, the way we designed the interface on the profile page is from the top the most important part that people will focus on which is a common topic and what kind of exercise they want to do. The others are brief introduction, the goal of their exercise and locations they usually go.
Chat list
Users can find the chatting list in their chat room. However, if you stop chatting for seven days, the system will disconnect
the relationship between two people
Conversation first, connection later
Once you open the conversation over 15 sentences, we will send a pop up message to ask you whether you want to connect to each other and become friends. If you choose later, you still can see the icon on the top of the screen that you can change your mind anytime. These actions should be taken within one day. After 24 hours, you won’t meet a person again if they are not on your friend list.
We set up the mechanism to let people have a conversation first and connect later because based on the experience of using the networking app, people tend to focus on meeting more and more people, however few of them will really talk with each other. Therefore, we are trying to push people realize each other a little bit more and consider to build the further connection
10. Takeways
Why this topic?
We are a group of engineers, PM and designers who are passionate about exercising. Therefore, while chatting with people, we understand that some of our friends want to cultivate the habit of exercising but lack the motivation, due to reasons such as some sports (e.g. muscle training, bouldering, squash etc.) need an experienced supervisor to ensure their safety. This is where our inspiration comes from. We hope that through this product, we can allow people to exercise and improve together.
Why a Progressive Web app?
Considering the number of engineers we have and the short amount of time we have for this project (6 months), we decided to go for a low-cost cross-platform solution. Besides, it allows users to engage with the product without installing. However, we are aware that using a browser to open an app can be unfriendly. Therefore, we kept our UI design simple and interactive, and removed unnecessary features and ads.
Next step
It is not easy for a group of 9 people to work together for a year, as we all had our full time job at the same time. Unfortunately, we only got the chance to finish the UI UX part. We hope that in the future, we will be able to publish the product and collect more feedback from users.