Extending studio management software to provide best-in-class workout programming tailored to the CrossFit community.
UI / UX / Prototyping / Web / Mobile
Contributors
Dan Rader, Project Lead
Meghan Bodenstab, Product Management
Callum Cook, Product Management
Rick Thompson, Engineering Lead
Maggie Chambers, Product Design Lead
Kelly Mahoney, Product Design
Mona Luan, Product Design
Kendall Kessler, Research
Mar Winslow, Research
Xplor Studio is an all-in-one business management software for small-to-medium-sized gyms and fitness studios. While rich with features and technically sound, Xplor Studio had a lack of brand equity and an unclear go-to-market strategy that affected short-term sales and potential for long-term growth.
Meanwhile….
a fellow Xplor product—Triib—had strong brand recognition in the CrossFit + Group fitness market, and had similar features to Xplor Studio. But the technology was unreliable and the product was losing clients because it was “hard to use” and “outdated”.
The team at Xplor identified an opportunity and developed a strategy to simplify Xplor’s product shelf by migrating users from Triib to Xplor Studio, while newly positioning Xplor Studio as “modality-specific” management software that serves the unique business needs of CrossFit + Group fitness gym and studio owners who are tired of a “one size fits all” solution.
A lack of brand equity and an unclear go-to-market strategy…
The Situation
The Task
It was up to my team to bring this strategy to life, while aiming to:
Migrate Triib users seamlessly and efficiently: we needed to provide parity for the most essential features so there would be no gap in service for our customers.
Unlock the total addressable market for CrossFit with a best-in-class user experience: we needed to work beyond the migration strategy and instead offer a product that would stand out in the market in the long term by delivering a best-in-class consumer experience better than our competitors.
Increase monthly sales: we needed to validate customer fit and scale rapidly with a goal to sell 50 sites a month by the end of 2022.
As the Design Lead, I oversaw the creative direction of the entire “coach-to-customer” experience, mentored junior designers, facilitated customer research sessions, participated in field studies, and ensured we were tracking against our ambitious goals and aggressive timeline.
Understanding CrossFit and Our Customers…
But First…
CrossFit was an entirely new market category for our team and one that has a well-defined community with a distinct culture and its own language (e.g., WODs, AMRAPs, Benchmarks, etc.). Before we could start designing, we as a team and as individuals needed to fully understand CrossFit, the athletes (the consumers), and the coaches (our clients). In addition to our own research efforts, we assembled a group of CrossFit athletes and coaches (our “product partners”) to serve as our advisors throughout the design process.
Our research and product teams worked together to conduct extensive research, including:
Competitive Research
User interviews to determine target personas for both Athletes (consumers) and Coaches (clients)
Feature Discovery
Field Study
Usability Testing of early concepts and wireframes
Designing the Athlete Experience
A major learning from the initial research was the importance of the pre-class and post-class meetings of athletes with their coaches, typically around a whiteboard. We decided to recreate this virtually by providing athletes the tools to view workouts, log results, track performance, and engage with their community before, during, and after workouts.
The virtual experience needed to serve as a companion to in-person interaction. Beyond standard features like booking classes or buying memberships, we enabled CrossFit athletes to:
Prepare for class: review upcoming workouts, educational content, and messages from the coach to make the most out of the WOD.
View past results: understand past results so they can gauge today’s efforts and calculate effort on specific movements
Track Performance: Athletes need to capture their results to set fitness goals and track personal progress over time.
Engage with the community: interact with fellow athletes via the leaderboard to drive engagement and build a sense of friendly competition
Designing the Coach Experience
A major learning from the initial research on the coach experience was the importance of time efficiency. Many coaches are not only instructing the classes but also programming workouts, cultivating community, and running the business. It was critical that our technology would make their experience easier rather than get in their way. We needed to provide coaches with powerful and flexible tools to help them wear multiple hats.
Beyond standard features like scheduling and selling classes, we enabled Coaches to:
1. Create highly curated workout plans for athletes.
This included referencing past workouts created at the studio, pulling from existing industry-standard benchmarks and movements, and assigning scoring types to workouts to inform performance tracking.
Programming can take many different forms. Coaches could be planning in hyper-detail for the week ahead or creating a “rough sketch” of a workout program months in advance. Our tool needed to handle both.
2. Bolster the in-class experience with an interactive TV Display.
While running the class, coaches need a way to provide additional context for workouts and to increase engagement, this is where TV displays come in. Coaches can project the WOD, play videos, pull up the leaderboard, and log scores in real-time.
3. Engage with Athletes
Coaches can utilize the coach’s app to stay engaged with athletes before and after a workout. We created a way for them to review the leaderboard, comment on past workouts, and get in touch with their athletes to make the Crossfit experience more personalized.
4. Increase competition and community with Events
In addition to regular classes and programming, we created robust events management features that enable coaches to seamlessly create, promote, and manage events. These features help drive engagement and grow their community in the form of charity events, special workouts, training sessions, competitions, and more.
Within 12 months, we entered an entirely new market with a product that is positioned well for long-term growth.
The Result
Triib Migration unlocked. 50% of Triib clients have migrated and the remaining are scheduled to migrate through the end of the year.
Doubled our monthly sales due to the additional CrossFit sales. Our steady increase puts our 50+ sites/month goal well within target.
Unlocked the Crossfit Total Addressable Market. Layering the Crossfit features on top of an already best-in-class business management software has made Xplor Studio a premium choice for gym owners looking to take their business to the next level.
Our initiative has left the company feeling confident that this model could be successful across other modalities.
Chief Fitness Officer - NCFIT
“What’s your background? Are you all Crossfit coaches? You have such intimate knowledge of Crossfit programming.”
VP of Product Design - Xplor
“The team took each concept through the rigor of our design process. They understood the competitive landscape and sourced inspiration outside of the category; rapidly iterated to create the breadth of possible solution areas; validated their early concepts with user testing (moderated or unmoderated); fleshed out their solutions with a deep understanding of journeys, edge-cases, and technical limitations; delivered detailed spec to our engineering team and QA’d the work in production environments before release.”
