Personal Trainer
How I helped Gympass to adapt to a new market during the COVID-19 crisis
INTRO
Gympass is a corporate wellness benefit that allows its users to access thousands of gyms and studios only by paying a unique employee membership fee. A company invests a monthly value that will allow providers to its employees Gympass as a benefit.
With the COVID-19 crisis and the lockdown in all countries, Gympass saw its numbers ground to zero.
To keep performing the product needed to readapt quickly to find ways to add more value to Gympass clients during these difficult times. To accomplish that a few new products came up. One of those was the Personal trainer initiative and I was the product designer responsible for the personal experience.
CHALLENGE
How might we adapt our current platform to personal trainers?
To answer that question I gather with Bruna Maia, UX Researcher Lead defined a discovery plan. Important to mention that before COVID this persona was never a priority to Gympass.
DISCOVERY PLAN
A deep understanding of the problem was the first step and to do this we mapped the most important questions we had related to all points of contact involved in the product cycle. We also did primary desk research to gather external information related to the subject. After that, we define the user interview strategy to try to answer some of these questions.
WHAT WE'VE DONE:
TAKEAWAYS
To provide a full personal trainer experience, Gympass needs to provide information exchange between consumer and personal trainer, and the possibility of recurrence and follow up.
INTERVIEW RESULTS
OPPORTUNITIES AND EXPECTATIONS
01/ In the end, fitness trainers are also available on gyms facilities, so the core differential of a personal trainer it's the 1-on-1, that's what we need to sell, not "personal trainer" itself.
02/ The motivation a personal trainer gives to you and the open line to communicate in a comfortable and customized way are the core values. Communication solutions should be on the spot.
03/ The smartphone is the most used device, so we should also consider a mobile experience for personal trainers.
04/ The personal trainer needs information about the user, as many as possible. He will use this to prepare the workout and to tracking goals.
05/ Consistency and continuous service it's important to proof the value of working out with a personal trainer, so we need to think about how we can make that personal relation between 1 user and 1 personal trainer possible.
06/ Besides 1-on-1 sessions, they often work with small groups of 3-4 people. The target variates since professional athletes to senior people with health issues. In that case, the approach and value proposition changes a little bit.
DELIVERABLES AND CONCLUSIONS
After this research was present to the board of the company it was clear we needed to change a lot of things in our product and before developing the full solution we started an MVP plan.
For the MVP we tested to offer online 1:1 sessions with personal trainers in Brasil and United States. The results were incredible.
In 3 months we were able to go from zero to 12k booking classes each month.
Now the next steps are to test the first version of an APP dedicated to personal trainers. See the prototype here.