Pump'd
Empowering First-Time Gym-Goers
Who Are Entering the Health and Wellness Space
Skills
UI/UX Design
User Research & Testing
End-to-End Design
Team
4 MHCID
Graduate Students @UW
Tools
Figma
Notion
Timeline
5 Weeks
Spring 2025
Overview
A New Way to Gym
Pump'd is a new multimodal approach to gym going. Aimed at new gym-goers, Pump'd aims to help those that are embarking on a fitness journey by building confidence through guided workouts and gamification elements to encourage habit building.
My Contribution
Leading
Experience Design
Led the design process of mobile and watch screen from low fidelity prototypes to final polished output for multisensory workout experience.
Mapping Customer Journey &
User Flow
Shaped customer journey maps through extensive competitive analysis of 4 existing competitors in the space, highlighting ways to provide new and meaningful experiences.
Project Leadership &
User Research
Conducted 8 rounds of usability studies and synthesized user friction points into key design pivots that informed the flow of the intended experience.
Key Experience Moments
Start A Workout with Confidence
Use NFC tags on machines to tap into an exercise and get going.
Workout Along to Audio Guides
Pump’d guides your form through the first reps. Once you’re comfortable, just follow the rhythm to keep a strong, steady pace.
Gamifying the Post-Workout Experience
Pump’d provides fun ways to keep track of your progress, as well as the ability to unlock features so the app grows with you.
Other Key Considerations
Personalize your Experience with AI
Unsure about how to get started? Look at a myriad of lesson plans or work alongside Pump’d AI to develop your own lesson plan that best fits your needs.
Take Pump'd With You During a Workout
Pair Pump'd with your wearables to make workouts more accessible than before.
Challenge
This issue is some really bad news for commercial gyms that make money on retaining memberships and manifests itself in 2 main ways:
High Drop-Off Rates
12% of annual gym sign-ups occur in January, driven by New Year’s resolutions BUT around 14% of new gym members quit within the 1st month. Additionally, around 50% of new gym members quit within their first 6 months.
Loss of Profit
L.A. Fitness, the largest commercial gym in the US, sees $2.15 billion in profits a year, and ~5M new members yearly. roughly $0.7B–$1.3B in potential lost revenue per year from early churn, depending on the average monthly price.
Research
How Did We Get To Pump'd?
Contextual Inquiry
Structured Interviews
5 Participants (1 gym regular, 4 gym newcommers)
What Did We Want To Learn:
How incoming gym goers approach the gym and interact with the new space around them.
What are their mental models when approaching machines, what determining factors impact their performance and overall comfort at the gym.
What are the use cases for instructions and how users learn about the environment around them as they attempt to complete a successful workout.
What Our Research Told Us About Newcommers to The Gym
Using a machine for the first time is often unintuitive across all user types (new, occasional, regular gym-goers).
“I don't know what the right the right way to place it is. So trying to play around to figure out what's the right way to do it to set up”
Users would rather stick to what they are familiar with due to intimidation by their lack of familiarity with the gym.
“Like, the dumbbells. They look kind of intimidating. But someday I would like to try them.”
“I know people don't care, but I always feel anxious that people are gonna think that I’m doing something wrong, or see that I don't know what I’m doing.“
Users lack an understanding of muscle jargon, thus struggle to correctly evaluate their performance.
“It's so weird. I just I feel like maybe I'm not doing it right. Or maybe [the machine] is engaging other parts of my body, but I don't really feel in my tricep as much.”
A combination of visual and audio cues provide users with the proper information to perform effectively.
“But [with audio cues] I feel more confident because… there was time for me to check like ‘okay, I did this, I did this’. And so that made me feel better.”
Ideation
How Could We Help?
After identifying the main issues our target users were facing, we moved into ideating to find out how we could design a more friendly experience for them. We ideated by first storyboarding the user journey to guide our design decisions, then by solidifying a central theme to encompass the experience, and finally by creating a user flow to map out our key interaction point.
Storyboarding User Journey to Guide Design Decisions
To better understand the experience to solve, I drew out storyboards depicting the current and prospective experiences, and how certain intervention points during pain points in the current experience might elevate a user's time at the gym.
Current Experience Pain Points
1
Confusion with machine and proper form to exhibit.
2
Insecure about asking for help, needing instructions to perform movement accurately.
3
No way to evaluate success, leaving user unsure about activity performed.
Prospective Experience Intervention Points
1
User easily can discover how to exhibit proper form.
2
Audio/visual instructions provide robust instructions that follow along as user works out.
3
Post-workout evaluation gives feedback on activity and performance
Create a Unifying Experience
Given our issue, we had to find a way to make people want to show up to the gym and do their best, we decided to lean heavy into gamifying the space as to make the experience feel more fun rather than daunting.
*This design metaphor and theme led most design decisions as we entered the iteration process
Developing a Central User Flow
Given our storyboard and theme from earlier, we focused on the main flow of getting a user through an exercise successfully. If we could successfully design a better way to engage newcomers when they use a machine they are uncomfortable with, then we considered that a big win.
Iterating & Testing
A Glimpse Into the Iteration Process
Concept Testing (n = 5)
What Did We Want to Learn:
- Does our idea help users navigate the space better?
- 60% of users wanted to dive right into a workout, initial process was too long.
- 80% of users didn't feel like rating workouts was needed.
Usability Testing (n = 4)
What Did We Want to Learn:
- How do improvements on the original flow help/deter users?
- Users preferred only audio instructions during a workout rather than both audio and visual.
- 100% of users felt some confusion with NFC scanning.
