A New Look for Teamup
As the lead product designer here at teamup, it’s important that I understand not just how our customers use our software, but also how they run their businesses. This helps me look beyond just making things pretty, to see how teamup can solve our customers’ problems and make their lives easier.
Our customer team has been one invaluable part of this. Being able to leverage their extensive experience guiding customers through the process of getting started with teamup and using it to run their businesses has shown me where improvements can be made. I’ve also spent some time talking with customers on the phone, learning why people start their own fitness businesses, what their goals are, and what challenges they face.
As a result of this research, the product team at teamup is excited to move forward with the first phase of a global redesign of both the business owner and customer experience of teamup.
What’s New?
We’ve just launched a new visual design for our left column menu, updating the look and feel to be more modern, clean, and readable. We’ve also changed how the menu works — instead of clicking to expand and collapse menu categories, you can now click to navigate directly to the top page in that section. We hope you’ll find it quicker and easier to get things done in teamup.
We have many more changes in the pipeline. But we’re not just changing things for the sake of change. Based on the ongoing effort to understand the role teamup can play in making fitness businesses run better, the product team has a set of goals that we’ll be working on in the next few months.
Goal: Make it Modern.
The first things you’ll see are largely superficial — new fonts, colors, and icons. While these changes may not seem important — and won’t match some of the rest of the site at first — they have all been tested for accessibility. We’re also focused on providing a reliable and accessible experience on all modern browsers, especially on small devices.
Goal: Make it Easy.
Our customers are busy. More than one has described themselves to me as a “one man band”! The last thing you want to do is spend more time adding customers to their database, chasing payments, or sending emails. Our goal is to facilitate your business, not add more tasks to your already long to-do list. We’ll do this by making teamup easier to use and making it more intuitive for new customers to hit the ground running.
Goal: Make it Powerful.
In addition to developing new features like additional triggers, we’ll also be adding functionality to features you already use, like drag-and-drop ordering, and a better way to preview how customers will see your teamup schedule. Our ongoing research will focus on prioritizing these new features, and making sure they work for our customers.
What’s Next?
Now that we’ve launched the new menu design, we’re going to continue redesigning elements of the site, upgrading our code, and bringing these goals to the entire customer experience of teamup. I know adjusting to change is hard, but I hope you’ll be patient with us. For a while, things might look a little mismatched or unbalanced. That’s because we’re updating the site incrementally — this allows us to gather feedback and act on it quickly, and I believe it can help our customers better adjust to our new look and feel.
These changes will take place over the next several months, and we’re working closely with the customer team to ensure that there are no disruptions in service, and that you’ll always be able to get your work done in teamup.
Lastly, we’ll continue conducting customer interviews and usability tests as we move forward. You may see messages in teamup from me occasionally asking for your help — your perspective will help us make the right choices as we continue down this path, and I appreciate your assistance. If you have questions about the design research methods we’ve been using, or want to participate in an interview, please feel free to email me.
Thanks for trusting teamup with your business. We’re excited to work with you to keep improving.
