iFIT provides users with a comprehensive and personalized fitness experience that helps them achieve their goals and improve their overall health and wellness. iFIT’s objective is to make fitness more engaging, personalized, and accessible to everyone.
Since launching our video-on-demand experience, our platform has undergone many changes. With the inclusion of our award-winning global workouts, our video library has exploded from zero to 20,000 trainer-led workouts from around the world and across multiple modalities. The content discovery and workout experience had become complex, and the technology had met its limits. The architecture was built on a framework that was outdated and couldn’t keep up with the demands of the growth iFIT was experiencing. The UX/UI had also suffered due to the intricate harmony of native and web view components built into our proprietary software.
To get to the heart of what makes the fitness journey frustrating within the iFIT platform, we conducted a series of surveys, interviews, empathy and experience mapping, and a 3-week diary study to get to the core of the problem. Our goal was to learn how to improve usability, increase engagement, and boost retention.
This gave us the knowledge to answer our assumptions, understand the pain points of our users, and what motivates them to workout.
How do you redesign and experience for 6.4 million people? Very carefully. We made assumptions and tested those assumptions with our end users, through research and usability testing. Throughout the course of our work we made How Might We… statements looking for ways to fulfill our goals of improving usability, increasing engagement, and boost retention.
I started my career as a professional pilot and learned about the effects of the human body under distress. How an omission of an instrument can create life threatening results. Through our research I noticed similarities in how a user reacts in the pilot seat verses how a user reacts when running up hill at a high speed and trying to make adjustments to the product. So we set-out to simplify the interface to limit that impact and create greater ease of use.
We introduced color and micro interactions in the interface, not only for delight, but to increase awareness, increase accessibility, and reduce fatigue. We looked at the flow and we grouped information by location, with easy tap gestures to cut down on the distance the user’s eye or hand would have to travel to make a change.
We learned that there isn’t a one size fits all experience, so we made the workout experience modular. They wanted less information when they wanted to focus and not think about the pain, and more when they were training for an event.
And finally we got out of the way. Our number one ask from our members was to allow them to be more immersed in the experience. So we made components smaller but easier to read, transparent but with contrast, and created moments of encouragement to keep them going!
