The Challenge
In the summer of 2018, our product partners came to design with the idea of creating an introductory gym program that would guide and educate lower level users who were unfamiliar with the territory. From a content perspective, we knew that we couldn’t support an experience that educated people on how to properly use gym equipment in the immediate future. We also didn’t have any weight-lifting exercises in our offering yet, which is highly associated with the “gym” term.
We did, however, have a large inventory of indoor cardio equipment workouts. Knowing this, we did a little research to validate whether or not users would be interested in a cardio equipment program and what they would be looking to get out of it.
We learned that users had a strong interest in cardio, particularly using equipment, with the intent to become leaner, improve heart health, and manage stress. More than 50% deemed that consistent exercise was already a part of their routine, while 45% state that they’ve been exercising regularly for less than a year. We felt strongly that we could cater to all of these users.
Working hand-in-hand with our curriculum expert and exercise coach, Adrian Richardson, we honed in on what a beginner experience could look like. In the end, we put together a three week program that aids in familiarizing users to a multitude of various pieces of cardio equipment, guides them through on how to best use them effectively and safely, and gets them into the habit of going to the gym consistently.
Week one focuses on the aspect of routine with lighter workouts that stick to cardio equipment most of us are familiar with (treadmill, elliptical) while week two works to build on that foundation while incorporating new approaches. In the best use case, week three challenges users to up their daily active minutes with what they’ve been exposed to the prior two weeks. Each week is set on a schedule that users can adjust before starting, and each day is adaptive, because we know that life sometimes gets in the way.
Alongside all of this was also the driven importance of post-wind-down routines. This program surfaces content to help you cool down, recover and replenish to help you get the most from your newly forming gym habits.
What We Were Hoping to Learn
After previously releasing several activity programs, we wanted to ensure that this continued to follow our patterns, but led to new insights on how to better our programs going forward. With this experience we wanted to specifically hone in on:
What kinds of indoor cardio workouts are people most interested in?
We knew that users wanted to exercise using cardio gym equipment, but we wanted further learnings on if there were any specific machines that people were gravitating towards to help us prioritize our content strategy in Q4. This program included varying recommended cardio sessions on scheduled workouts days. From there, we could track which workouts people chose.
Will delivering educational tips within celebrations help drive users to complete post workout rituals and drive engagement?
Part of successful habit formation is education. People need to understand the why in order to get to the how. Prior to this in our other programs, most of this information was living within articles, which most people we disregarding, so these moments of learning were often being missed. Design’s question was, is there another way for us to surface this information that will get users to actually engage with it. The hypothesis was that if we prompt messaging after a user has completed a workout that both informs and celebrates them, than they’ll be more likely to read it and feel inclined to participate in a workout wind-down rituals, which our curriculum designer felt was an important part of successfully forming a new workout routine, but was often times overlooked.
Are there further barriers that are keeping users from going to the gym that we can help with?
With programs still being so fresh and new, we still have a lot to learn about the obstacles that users face. We wanted to use the opportunity of a user failing the first week of this program to dive deeper into the reasoning and also provide possible solutions.
Will this program help users keep a routine after completing their program?
We wanted to understand our users desire to continue keeping up the routine that they had begun working to achieve over the course of the 3 weeks. After completing the program, we help users to set a consistent exercise goal in the app in the hopes of keeping the momentum going.