Design thinking tools for a small fitness facility
Understanding the problem
I’ve applied design thinking to a problem at my workplace. Smalltown Boxing Club (SBC- not the club’s real name) is a small fitness club in a small city in B.C. The club has a large weight room and it offers boxing and parkour programs, fitness and yoga classes, and professional consultations.
SBC welcomes at-risk youth and marginalized people. Local police and social services often refer kids to the gym. I quote from a letter of support the gym received from a local constable:
“A common attribute associated with the youth that police deal with is a lack of self-worth and confidence. Often lacking in education and many of the social skills many of us take for granted, boxing instills pride and purpose in its students. Realizing the capacity to do something that few others can do is uplifting and motivating and activates a drive that can manifest in other achievements that would go otherwise unfulfilled.”
However, the SBC’s revenue is marginal at best.
I used design thinking techniques to identify root causes and users’ pain points, hoping to suggest ways that the club can access more predictable revenue.
Problem statement
My problem statement: “How can SBC expand their clientele and increase their revenue?”
Introducing SBC
The head boxing coach owns the SBC, but the gym facility is home to four other programs too, each owned by a different sole-proprietor: There is a parkour program, a personal trainer, a postural expert, and a yoga teacher. The gym employs a part-time staff person (me) and several instructors on contract.
Direct stakeholders are: adult clients who box, kids who box and their parents or guardians, kids who take part in the parkour program and their parents or guardians, adults who use the fitness equipment, personal training, or postural alignment services, and kids or adults who attend yoga classes. Users can participate in one program or many, as they want.
Indirect stakeholders are: community members who benefit from the social good that the club provides.
The environment:
SBC operates in a small city of 10,000 people with a relatively high number of fitness facilities. There are at least seven full-service fitness gyms, although no other gyms offer parkour or classic boxing. There are over ten yoga studios and dozens of independent yoga teachers in town.
Is this a good problem to solve with design thinking?
Since there are so many gyms, does it matter if SBC stays open? I don’t want to presuppose the answer to this question, so I’m using the design thinking process.
Start with empathy
Brown (2009) says that design starts with what makes humans’ lives easier or more enjoyable, and it requires that we understand culture and context. This means that we need to understand our end users. To understand SBC’s end users, I did four unstructured interviews with club users and analyzed online reviews. I also gathered feedback from people who don’t use the club.
With this feedback, I used the 5 Whys, Empathy Mapping, and Journey Mapping techniques to get a picture of SBC users and their pain points.
The 5 Whys
The 5 Whys helped me identify three root causes. These were: 1) I don’t want to be associated with boxing; 2) I don’t know anyone who goes there and I don’t know what to expect in that place; and 3) I feel safer and more comfortable in my usual gym.
Empathy Map
I did an Empathy Map to analyze the club’s end-user needs.
The needs I identified were: safety, convenience, clarity of process, need for a structured workout, social status, belonging, and accessibility.
Maslow’s Hierarchy
I wanted to determine which of these needs were primary, so I compared them with the classifications in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. SBC’s hierarchy of user needs starts with physiological (to feel safe) and moves up the pyramid to self-actualization. This is the order of needs I came up with: 1) to feel safe; 2) to belong; 3) to access (physical) 4) to have social status; 5) to accomplish; 6) to have self-growth; and 7) to be creative.
Insights
After this, I moved on to insights.
I determined that some users’ (or non-users’) pain points are: feeling unsafe, feeling like they don’t belong in the gym, worry that using the gym might damage their social status (because of the boxing component). I also noted that some users with disabilities can’t access the gym because of the stairs.
I also identified some gain points: ways that the gym could meet user needs in the higher levels of the SBC pyramid once primary needs are met. These “gain points” include accomplishment, self-growth, and creativity.
Journey mapping
I created a journey map that looked at the user experience of current users, past users, and non-users. I used feedback from my interviews, retention stats from our customer management system, online reviews, and things I’d heard from users and non-users over the last two years.
I designed the journey map to show four user stages: 1) the first contact; 2) thinking about it… ; 3) I’ll go inside…; and 4) This is my gym!
In stage one, the users’ contact points are the front door, social media, other media, and what they know/think about boxing. I’ve identified the front door and boxing’s reputation as pain points, and social media, and other media as gain points. The front door is both a pain point and a gain point.
Stage two finds users “thinking” about using the gym. I’ve identified the stairs and boxing’s reputation as the primary pain points for some in this step. The club’s convenient downtown location is a gain point. Other points are more or less neutral.
Stage three is “I’ll go inside …”. The main gain points are “trying new things” and getting familiar with the gym culture.
Finally, a user may decide to stay (stage four), and there are many possible reasons for this.
Finding the opportunities
My initial problem statement was “How can SBC expand their clientele and increase their revenue?”
Through the design thinking process, I turned my problem into various opportunities by making “how might we” (HMW) statements.
Here are a few of these
- How might SBC address users’ desires for a safe gym to use
- How might SBC emphasize the wide range of services they offer in addition to boxing
- How might SBC make the user journey more predictable to minimize uncertainty
- How might SBC make the gym more comfortable
- How might SBC dispel the appearance of an “in-group” without sacrificing its personality
- How might SBC emphasize that it is a place for users to foster self-growth and creativity without intimidating users
- How might the SBC develop itself as a place to increase users’ social status (without jeopardizing its commitment to welcome marginalized people).
- How might the SBC offer programs to people with disabilities who can’t access the gym (maybe offsite or online).
- How might the SBC play up its convenient downtown location
- How might the SBC entice people to come in to try the gym so they will decide to stay.
Final thoughts
The solutions I came up with using design thinking can help solve my original problem and also to create solutions for problems that I hadn’t thought of.
References
Brown, T. (Sept 30, 2009) Tim Brown urges designers to think big. TED Talks, YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAinLaT42xY
Chico (N.D.) Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs by Chico — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77918631
Fisher, C. (2020) Empathy Map
Fisher, C. (2020) Five Whys
Fisher, C. Journey Map
Photo credits
(credits with photographs in text)
Catherine Fisher, Louis Bockner, Bobbi Barbarich,
