Fitforge
User Research, Product Design
The brief: design a community app meant to encourage movement.
Fitforge is built to be an approachable, flexible, and meaningful fitness companion. Through extensive research, three goals emerged for the app: connect people with fitness communities; educate about fitness and healthy lifestyles, and; spur action by providing a starting point and paths to progress.
The modes of research included competitive analyses of similar experiences (of which there are not many, like Peloton, Nike Run Club, and Strava) and digital surveying.
What are some of the sentiments and frustrations people have with gyms and working out?
I put posters with a QR code to a survey all over my campus to find out. I got over 50 respondents providing valuable information on a variety of qualitative and quantitative questions.
Five examples from the survey of 17 questions that I engineered to obtain direction for the product
The survey responses revealed several recurring themes and insights into peoples's experiences, preferences, and challenges in their fitness journeys.
It became clear that creating a space where users can feel comfortable, supported, and encouraged would align well with the needs highlighted in the research. At the very least in finding a fitness community, it would greatly benefit Fitforge users to be able to finely adjust and filter their results based on interests, experience level, and other personal, unique criteria.
I distilled these findings into user personas with empathy maps to be more specific in my thinking about how to design Fitforge with the user in mind. In creating personas, I'm careful not to homogenize the characteristics and maintain a broad sense of who the app is for.
The sketching process, while somewhat messy and a mixture of low- and mid-fidelity, provides a lot of structure to thinking about how different features will fit together (and which features need to be cut). It also gives a sense of ordering; which screens should be more immediate to the user and which should take multiple interactions to reach, and I can note the direction of the flow. A lot will change in the process from sketches to high-fidelity prototypes based on further research and testing, but the sketches provide the skeleton of the app.
In order from left to right is sketching for the onboarding flow, Search bottom sheet with filtering and gym components, gym page with the membership pass ordering flow, Explore page with the articles flow and the custom program creation flow.
The onboarding gives the user the sense that Fitforge is inclusive and welcoming of all interests and experience levels. The preferences set during onboarding provide the content for the Explore and Program pages.
The interface of Fitforge was designed with the iOS interaction guidelines in mind, utilizing the top-level navigation of iOS 18 components (such as navigation tab bars, search bars, and icon action buttons), but otherwise using bespoke interface elements. This makes the app feel familiar and approachable for users, while still expressing a unique flair.
Prototyping the flow of filtering fitness communities on the home screen (Search)
Prototyping the saving an article flow (Explore)
The last main purpose of Fitforge is to spur action.
I discovered from the survey results that one of the primary challenges people face when joining a fitness community or starting their fitness journey is feeling or looking out of place because of lack of a plan. The program section is designed to give people a basic plan to just get started, with detailed tips and instructions on proper form, and the means to advance when needed.
The Program flow from creating and adding a custom program (with related articles) to viewing an exercise
