Case study: BEAT81 | Training in community.
For many people trying to incorporate regular exercise into their routine, as well as when starting any new activity, motivation is a key factor in being consistent and being able to achieve this ambition. For different reasons, this goal is not always achieved and causes a lot of frustration and pain for those who see this objective broken.
There are many reasons why this cannot be done, such as economic factors, schedules, interaction with other people in the workout place, and so many others that this would become a list of excuses not to train, and that is not the purpose of this article. But how do we then get someone who is just starting to train regularly, or who decides to resume training, to be consistent and become a permanent member?
Luckily for us, BEAT81 asked similar questions to this one, which became my final project at the Ironhack Bootcamp in Berlin.
But, what is BEAT81 actually? It’s a fitness start-up company that offers several workout options, overseen by professional trainers, as they use heart rate technology to track the user’s progress, ensuring optimal performance. BEAT81 was founded in 2017 by Tim Dettmann, a Badminton player at a national level for over 20 years, who developed powerful methods to maintain his fitness motivation and was keen to share his knowledge. BEAT81 offers user-centred workouts with a high level of Hospitality in indoor gyms and spinning studios, as well as in outdoor locations throughout Berlin and other European cities, and online classes for those who can’t assist in person. The user’s performance is tracked and displayed on screens in the corresponding location, so that when working out above 81% of the max heart rate, the metabolism is ignited, burning fat faster and building strength. BEAT81 also offers 3 free workouts before the users commit. After that, users with paid accounts can access a different amount of in-person training, according to their plan, and users with free accounts can only access the online classes. Finally, BEAT81 works in partnership with some established Gym chains, like Urban Sports Club or Onefit, to offer indoor locations throughout the city.
According to our project Brief, the target audience of BEAT81 is 25 to 40 years old, with a female majority (65/35), they practice sport actively but not professionally, and they have a medium to medium-high finance level. They have also made some previous surveys and user interviews, where they learn that enhancing social connections and a sense of community can prolong the life of their clients, as they can train surrounded by people they know, helping to motivate each other and increasing word of mouth. This was a very useful hint that they gave us, but we decided to validate this information with UX research following the Design Thinking process. Finally, the app is used by both BEAT81 users and coaches, as the firsts can book their workouts, track their performances, and chat with coaches through the app.
As our stakeholders couldn’t share their User Database, I decided to attend at least one workout to interview some of them and get a deeper insight into the workout and the overall experience, also to learn how the app is perceived by regular users once they use their free trial. I’ll talk later about the results of these interviews.
About the User interface, our stakeholders were implementing a new design system in their mobile app based on the latest company Brand, so they rather have some new style proposed from our side, so they can benchmark against their proposal.
To summarise, the project length was two weeks (the last two) during the UX/UI Ironhack Bootcamp, and in this opportunity, I had the pleasure of working with Karolina Do Huu and Anubha Singh. All of us took part together during the different stages of development of this project, but to sum up, in this project my role was UX Research, UX strategy, UX Design, and UI Design. The goal and main KPI for the project were to increase the conversion of new customers from the free trial to a paid subscription, by the implementation of a new feature or flow in their mobile app, or by improving an existing feature, or by creating a cross-platform strategy, etc. We could suggest anything, as long as the decision process behind it was well reasoned. That’s why we followed the Design Thinking process, so let’s get on with it.
Stage 1 — Empathise & Discover
As a totally recommended first step, we began by planning and organizing our design process schedule by setting our roadmap for the next two weeks. Here we decided which steps in the UX and UI process should we follow along with this project.
Business Analysis
We began the Empathise stage by learning more about our stakeholder and their position in the market.
The main mojo of BEAT81 is happiness is active, and their mission is to bring fitness and happiness to everyone’s life. Their vision is to be the most caring, supportive and empowering community in people’s lives, and the values that drive them are:
- Be inclusive: Fitness is accessible to anyone with the right mindset. Everyone is welcome to join the BEAT81 community.
- Commit to growth: Long terms happiness is built by making the simple daily commitment to showing up and moving forward.
- Be radically caring: Radical hospitality is at the heart of what BEAT81 does, that’s why the hosts/trainers genuinely care.
- Energize others: They know a positive community is unstoppable, so they do everything they can to nurture and energize it.
We also had a meeting with our stakeholders, represented by the BEAT81 Design Lead and the CPO, to get a deeper understanding of the company before we could continue. To do this, we prepared questions related to different aspects of the business, such as user behaviour, previous experiences and decisions taken, what are some coming features in the app, etc. We did this, to get the most from them and to learn which paths were already covered. Thus, they gave us many interesting insides about these topics plus others like what have they modified of the user experience in the past, who they consider their main competitors, as some of their current hypotheses about future strategies.
Competitive analysis
After our meeting, we processed all the information we could gather into a Competitive analysis, which help us to better understand the market, better target customers, forecast Market potential and track competitor’s product, among others. Spinning clubs, boutique gyms and offline gyms are considered by the stakeholders as their main competitors, so we analysed five of the companies named by them, according to their offer, prices, target user, their strengths, weaknesses, and customer service.
From the analysis of our competitors, we learn the following key findings:
- most competitors don’t offer group workouts, focusing on individual personalised workouts.
- some gyms focus on luxury interiors as part of their main offer.
- most of them have big problems with customer service.
- their locations are limited by their expansion level, in contrast to BEAT81 which works in partnership with other gyms.
- in most cases, they only offer one workout session as a trial.
- some offer nutritional assistance in addition to more mainstream services.
- only a few offer special workout events.
- some of them provide employee discounts.
Quantitative and Qualitative User research.
As previously mentioned, our stakeholders gave us some hints about their customers (25 to 40 years old, female majority, practice sport actively but not professionally), but to go more in-depth, we decided to gather more information through interviews and surveys. To decide what do we need to learn, who do we need to learn from, what we already know, and how do we reach these people, we used the Lean Survey Canvas.
This is how we defined two groups of people to whom we would ask our questions: non-BEAT81 users who train actively (as our Subject Matter Experts) and BEAT81 users. We were able to talk to 7 people from the first group and survey another 35 participants, while, as mentioned above, we decided to attend two training to interview some users, only one agreed to answer us, but eight others answered the same questions in the form of a survey that we prepared considering that they might not feel like answering after the training. In addition, one BEAT81 user agreed to answer some additional questions via email.
From the results of our surveys to the non-BEAT81 users we could learn that:
- to feel better is the main reason why 84,4% does sport.
- 66,7% prefers to do workout in a group or with a friend, for motivation and to compete.
- 90% answered that location is one of the most important factors while choosing a workout place.
- 66,7% chooses a place that offers a flexible schedule.
While from the interviews with the same group we also learn that:
- Workouts in groups are more motivating.
- The majority choose the gym or fitness studio because of the other people who assist.
- A great atmosphere at the workout place is very important.
- Competition in the group gives additional motivation.
- Most interviewees prefer to workout during weekdays.
- Crowded places discourage people to keep attending a gym or fitness studio.
From the interview and surveys of BEAT81 users, it is worth highlighting that:
- “Beat81 could start building a community of participants, and organizing competitions, this makes things more fun and enjoyable at least for me.”
- “I wanted to do sport with people and Beat81 offers it. I get more motivated while being surrounded by others.”
- “I choose the workout based on workout format, location, and people attending. The more participants and more competitive people, the better.”
Affinity diagram
We then compiled all the information collected into an affinity diagram, where we found that certain responses were repeated. In this way, we grouped these topics into the following clusters: Community, Equipment, Facilities, Good feeling, Location, People, Price, and Team.
Empathy Map
In addition, we used the empathy map to get to know our users better and to better identify their pain points, as well as to articulate what we already know about them and create a shared understanding of the user’s needs, aiding decision making by synthesizing their rational and sentimental factors through their senses, sorting answers from the previous interviews and surveys.
User Persona
Based on the learnings gathered during the UX research and which were organised by the methods mentioned above, we created our User Persona to help us understand users’ motivations and needs and how these translate to online use and consumption and, ultimately, purchasing decisions.
So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Sara Diaz, a 32-year-old HR specialist from Valencia, Spain, who has been living in Berlin for 5 months. Her goals and ambitions are focused on getting fitter, feeling better, finding people to workout with, and finding a safe place to workout during corona times, all ideally on weekdays. Her frustrations are that coaches are too expensive, the lack of available training places near her location, and the fact that she doesn’t like crowds. Also, as she is new to the city, she misses a training buddy to help her stay motivated.
Journey map
To help us better empathise with Sara’s pain points during her experience we created her Journey map, so we can see the touchpoints, actions, frustrations and also opportunities when she attends training.
Sara’s Journey Map, shows her on a weekday, after leaving her office, thinking how to spend her afternoon. She decides to spend it actively, so she searches for a HIIT Beat81 workout, looking for an outdoor location because the weather is great. She books the workout, although she doesn’t feel comfortable going alone because none of her friends can attend with her. Also, when she looks in the BVG app where this location is, she founds out that it will take her 25 minutes to reach that place, besides she must run to catch the tram, arriving not only just before the workout begins, but also already tired after work and rushing through the city. During the workout, she feels great. But later, when she’s going home, she feels exhausted after the whole day, and most importantly she misses working out with people who share the same motivations.
Stage 2 — Define
With what we learned from the previous stage in mind, we defined the Problem Statement and How-Might-We, to help us clarify our goals and to decide which solutions we should implement during the sprint to solve Sara’s Pain Points.
“We have observed that the BEAT81 app doesn’t allow users to meet the goal to feel motivated to exercise accompanied by friends or a group, which is causing that users stop using the app due to a lack of motivation, which reduces the number of conversions of new customers from free trial to a paid subscription.”
“How might we make Beat 81 users feel part of a community that not only motivates but also cares, supports and empowers each other.”
To bring an answer to this and to propose an expected result, we then defined our Hypothesis statement.
“We believe, that by creating a social aspect in the app our users are going to feel more like a part of the community which will motivate them keep attending to the classes. This feature will help to increase the number of paid subscriptions. We will know we are right with quantitative feedback.”
From this, we confirm the information provided by our stakeholders in the brief, concerning the social component. Although the users mentioned the importance of the location, facilities or price, being part of the community is one of the company values that we couldn’t appreciate in the app.
Stage 3 — Ideate & Develop
As we began with the ideation stage, we decided to use the Crazy 8’s method to bring as many ideas as we can in 8 minutes and then present them to the other members of the team, to discuss and evaluate them. The ideas that we consider to be the most feasible based on our research are presented below in red.
As we collected these ideas we order them following the MoSCoW method to prioritise the features that could bring better solutions, fit for our How-Might-We statement.
As a result, we decided to create three modes of privacy that users can select while onboarding and change any time in the settings options: public, private and only trainer view. These different levels of privacy allow keeping their privacy for those who prefer to not share their information with others. There would be also an optional feature that allows connecting with others. Currently, the existing chat on the app is dedicated to communicating only with the coaches, so we want to change this allowing users to communicate with other members in a 1on1 chat. Another feature that we thought the app must have is allowing users to see who is attending the classes, enabling them to look for friends or acquaintances. Since users receive a welcome message introducing the app when they install it, we would like to extend this message to include the possibility to directly book a slot for a beginners’ training, since according to our stakeholders those who start using the app with these classes have a longer customer life.
User Flow
Then we define the User flow to test if our assumptions could bring an answer to our Hypothesis. So we set two different flows to add new connections. In the first one, Sara sets her profile as public and uses the search option to find a person she trained with last time — Ada. After adding her to her contact list, she searches for the next workout Ada attends and books the same class.
In the second flow, after Sara finished the workout, she wants to add another connection — Tina. This time, she uses the “workout details” page to find and connect to her. While checking Tina’s profile, Sara receives an invitation from Jan who she met at the last workout, so she accepts and starts a chat.
Stage 4 — Prototype & Test
LO-FI prototypes
We then took pen and paper and began to develop our LO-FI prototypes based on the previous findings and ideas conceived. After that, we selected what we evaluate as the best ideas and started to transfer this to our MID-FI prototypes.
MID-FI prototypes
After preparing our MID-FI prototypes, we entered them into maze.co to test the user flows. Here we obtained 21 responses, of which we emphasise the following:
- The privacy of the profile should be located in the “Profile” menu, not as we assumed as a part of a “Privacy” menu.
- Visibility of who attends the class needs to be improved and better displayed.
- It’s important to write the tasks clearly, and inform testers that sometimes Maze needs a few seconds to react.
As you can see in the picture above, we still needed to work a lot on solving many of the problems that our users keep having. Although some of the results received allowed us to continue working on improving our MVP, we felt that these would not meet the expectations of BEAT81 users and would not necessarily meet our goal of creating a social aspect to motivate user conversion. Building a community requires more than just a chat. That’s why we decided to go back to the ideation stage once more, to see if we can make some changes that allow us to reach our goals.
Stage 3 V2 — Ideate & Develop
As we had a deadline to meet, we asked for help from our Lead Teacher Juno, to help us with the ideation process. After presenting him our UX research, User Persona and Problem statement, we develop a brainstorming session in which we review our data and propose new ideas and questions. Thanks to this, our project took a new path to reach our goal.
As already mentioned, just a chat doesn’t create a community, so we decided to keep it, but inside the new section called Community in which, in addition to the chat, we include a list of contacts, and a new feature called Teams.
In Teams, users can log on to any group in which they have an interest, depending on the workout format, nutritional tips, or any other topics related to BEAT81. Initially, only BEAT81 hosts could create new Teams, with the idea of reviewing this in the future to assess the benefits of users creating their own Teams.
To avoid harassment, bullying, or any negative interaction on the app, the only way to add new contacts will be after attending the same workout. Also, this contacts list will be called BeatMates and thus each contact will be called BeatMate. By adding a person as BeatMate, the user will have access to view their statistics, results and bookings. This way we encourage competition and at the same time comradery among BeatMates.
The chat will be only available between BeatMates, allowing better filtering for users, while maintaining a safe and comfortable space for them.
We finally came with the idea of taking a group selfie after the workout, for those who want to participate in it, to reinforce again the team spirit and community. This picture would be visible only for those who take part in it.
MoSCoW method
After adding these new ideas to our MoSCoW method, it started to seem more like an experience that could motivate the building of a community.
Trying to be sure this time that the effects of our ideas will encourage the building of a community, we carried out a pros and cons analysis of them.
Sitemap
After that, we decided to define the sitemap, to see how our features will fit into the current state of the app, based on the information gathered during the first test. The cards in red show where our new features are added to the existing ones.
User Flow
Following this, we designed three happy flows in which Sara can discover the new functionalities of the app. These flows helped us to test later how the new features will affect the experience.
Flow 1: Sara launches the app and checks her stats from the last workout, so she opens her profile, and then check her results. Following this, she checks the attendance list and finds Tina, to whom she sends a connection request. After Tina accepts the request, Sara checks Tina’s profile and books a slot at the next training Tina will attend.
Flow 2: After finishing her workout, Sara launches the app and rates it. She receives a connection request from Mascha, who she met during her last training, so she accepts it.
Flow 3: Sara is interested in learning more about HIIT training. She accesses the “Community” menu and joins a group about this topic. After writing her questions, she gets a reply from another group member and books a class.
Stage 4 V2 — Prototype & Test
Design System
During this stage, and as we already count on our stakeholders' permission to propose new elements to their Design System, so they could benchmark against their proposal, we developed our UI elements based on the User Interface of their Acquisition website, following the Atomic design principles.
Keeping in mind the results of the first test, we reorganised the workout card’s content to increase the visibility of the participants, accentuating the feeling of belonging to a group. The CTA button was changed to fit the new style which was already implemented on the website. We also add a new filter option to search for the workouts that friends will attend, avoiding pointless scrolling through the many workouts that BEAT81 offers. We also changed the location and address icon, making it more recognisable and easy to read. Finally, we defined a larger size and position for the Coach image, because in many responses from our UX research we found that a motivational coach is also an incentive to attend workouts.
As already mentioned in the previous stages, we decided to modify the navbar arranging the Chat into the Community menu, and also here on Community we added the already mentioned filter option to make it easier to find a group of interest. We too replace the Dashboard menu with the Profile menu.
HI-FI prototype
To see the HI-FI prototype in action, please see the video below:
Testing
After uploading our HI-FI prototype to Maze for our final test, we received 22 replies, of which 17 were able to fulfil the task and 5 gave up. From here, our most relevant Insights were that:
- the display of the list of participants on the workout result page needs to be improved.
- users got confused that they had to click once more and go deeper to see workout results. We could reduce this in another future Iteration.
Stage 5 — Deliver & Learnings
After our successful final presentation in front of our teachers and classmates, we got in contact with our Stakeholders to show them our presentation and our deliverables, like a summarised UX research, an Insight analysis, User flows and HI-FI mockups.
Next steps
As our project was built in the existing app, we would like to test it with real users to learn from their reactions. Our learnings were based on the results that we got from our research with also non-users of BEAT81, but we consider that more accurate research and testing is needed to deliver a tailored experience to the real users to give them exactly what they need.
Due to the time constraints, we left many ideas from the Should have section of the MoSCoW method for the next sprint. They have the potential to help to reach our KPI and we believe that they are worth a try in a future round of testing. The results of these would show us if the users think that we are right.
Learnings
I think that this project was very Insightful in many ways, such as showing us again that the importance of having a well-planned roadmap is key if at some point the project must go back to some stages or anything unexpected happens. As in our case, this allowed us to deliver a better product, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity if we hadn’t prepared and maintained our roadmap.
I also learned that even if a project has already some research done, it wouldn’t hurt to validate these results with another research, if the roadmap and the time constraints allow it. Many deep learnings for our project came from our interviewees, and without them, it would be much more difficult to continue with the Ideation stage.
It was a great chance to develop a project for a real company, with great professionals who helped us by answering our questions and sharing valuable information. This gave me a more clear idea of what is expected from us in the coming future as UX/UI designers, and also what to expect from the industry.
Another learning was that there is no such thing as bad ideas or a specific order to implement features and solutions like a recipe on a project. Everything should be tested and analysed (according to the correspondent roadmap, of course) before emitting any judgement or taking any resolution.
Working with Anubha and Karolina was a great experience. We worked hard with a clear goal in our minds, which was to develop the best possible solutions, to enhance our users' experience. We worked together as a team and support each other in every step, which doesn’t mean that we agreed on everything. We discussed each decision, trying to bring a holistic view to our thinking to find the best possible solution for each case. Thanks to our teamwork, we developed a great product, that hopefully will be reflected in the future with some of our ideas on the BEAT81 app.
If you find this case study interesting or you have some ideas, please don’t hesitate and leave a comment. Also, you can also find me on LinkedIn if you would like to stay in contact. Cheers!
