Background
Lenus is a platform for online fitness coaching. It offers products for both coaches and their clients. The core of the platform is planning and tracking of two major aspects of lifestyle change: fitness activities and nutrition.
For workout planning, one of the strategic directions had been the move towards supportive automation. By providing smart suggestions to coaches and reducing repetitive tasks we could free up their time and attention so that they could direct it to more meaningful tasks such as direct client communication.
This project was the first step in this direction.
Defining business case and product foundations
The project objective was formulated as follows: "Increase coach efficiency when creating and using workout plan templates by reducing friction and cognitive load."
The value of this feature set had already been validated via previous research and evaluating the requests coming from the users.
Together with a product manager we formulated the set of assumptions and hypotheses guiding design work, as well as the set of metrics.
As for the scope, we started with applying automated suggestions to the content that coaches already create and use — their templates for workout plans.
Our task became to figure out how to serve that existing content at the right time and on the right inputs.
User story mapping that we used to get an overview of all potential features and prioritize them
💡 Process: user research → information architecture → UX mapping → concept development → iterative prototyping and user testing
Concept development
Two factors largely shaped the concept development work.
One was that the new feature set should fit into the existing user flow and the workflow patterns that coaches already prefer. This required a solid knowledge of those workflows. During the earlier iterations we validated and prioritized all the potential flow variations.
Our concepts had 'roots' from the start — they were placed in the context of the exsisting interface, and user testing included steps that preceded and followed the functions being tested.
The second factor was that this feature set was heavily dependent on the workouts metadata and client data. We had to look at what data is available for the matching of workouts to clients, and which of those data points are considered most relevant by coaches.
A simple visual documentation helped to bring clarity to the different metadata-related discussions.
Iterative prototyping and user testing
We have produced quite a few UI variations, gradually narrowing down to a solid flow and functionality.
On the earlier stages we also tested the metadata options to make sure we provide the best suggestions that match the client data and the coach needs.
Some of the UI variations
An important part of my work was to document the objectives and the learnings from each iterations. For any piece of research or testing I am able to say, why it was done, what we learned and what could be the next steps following that research.
Documenting research findings
Outcomes
- A set of designs validated through four iterarions of user testing. This highly reduced the uncertainty about what this part of the product should be like.
- The information architecture and the data requirements for different stages of development: what we can do with the currently existing data for the MVP, how we can improve the datasets in the future and what features would that allow to build.
- A detailed learning plan to make the most out of the following iterations of user testing, qualitatively and quantitatively.