E-Commerce: Strong Roots — Case Study Project 2
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For our second project we, Jacob Bunnan, Nicolas Balbontin, Ueide Texeira and myself, had to design a responsive website for a local business or professional. Since I’m currently based in Brazil and have no contacts in Amsterdam where I am doing my course I had to leave finding a business to my teammates. Luckily one of them had a friend called Zoe Hofstetter of Strong Roots personal training. Zoe isn’t very satisfied with her website, she’s at the second or third iteration and was thinking of making another. She is a personal trainer, she focuses on increasing her clients’ strength, injury recovery and fixing their posture. She doesn’t do body building or weightloss. In her own words:
I had anorexia when I was 17. My mechanism to deal with the constant fight and stress towards food, was to do sports, enough that I wouldn’t have to think about gaining weight the whole time. Movement healed me but it also injured me. One can’t cover one problem by overdoing something else in order not to see the original problem. So movement taught me how to listen to myself, taught me to be grateful for my body and to spend time on it on a daily basis by listening, feeling and complying.
This is who Zoe is, this is what she is about. She wants to teach people to listen to their own bodies, she wants to teach people to move.
“It’s not about transforming — it’s about knowing how to use what you already have”
Zoe Hofstetter.
As always we go through the following steps:
We won’t be implementing anything and I will have a final 7th step for my final thoughts about the process.
Empathize
We first started off with our secondary research, looking into her website, looking through blogs, reading studies and finding statistical information with which we’d work with to prepare ourselves for our interview. From our research we found out that ironically while fitness is less of a priority for people in their 30s to 45 due to lifestyles that involve children, work problems and even taking care of older parents, that it is critical for them to fight off the effects of aging and the development of future and current physical pain. We also found out that 11% of gym goers haven’t gone to the gym in a year and that 23% of them only visited the gym 3 times in a year.(Business Bliss Consultants FZE. (November 2018). Research into Motivations and Constraints For Going to the Gym. Retrieved from https://ukdiss.com/examples/physical-exercise-gym-motivations.php?vref=1). Another study highlighted the importance of empathy in trainers, the study defines empathy as follows:
Empathy refers to the trainer’s understanding of the client’s experience and her skill in effectively listening to their difficulties. Several clients preferred trainers who have personally experienced the challenges associated with weight loss and adhering to an exercise program. Alicia commented,
“I knew I wanted someone who had lost the weight, who knew what it felt like to struggle…I wanted someone who felt that [way] to train me”.
(Melton D, Dail TK, Katula JA, Mustian KM. Women’s Perspectives of Personal Trainers: A Qualitative Study. Sport J. 2011 Jan;14(1):0104. PMID: 26005398; PMCID: PMC4439248.).
During this part of the process three questions stood out to me from a blog article by Dustin Maher:
1. Who do you want to be a hero to?
2. How do you want to be a hero to them?
3. What product or service can you create to do that?
For him it was stay-at-home moms. He wanted to help them be their healthiest, most energetic selves by selling them bootcamp-style training with free child care. Answering these questions might lead us to, in Ux/Ui terms, figure out who our User Personas are and what our MVP should be.
After doing our research and getting some help from ChatGPT we came up with our questions for the stakeholder interview, which went well. From our interview we found out that she has a full schedule and can’t take any more clients. At the moment what the website she has is more like a landing page. Zoe wants to have a more engaging website and expand her business and make passive income by selling semi-personalized work out programs so that’s what we’re going to work on. We can work on that. She was reluctant to tell us about who her target demographic was, either we didn’t explain the question well enough and why it’s important or she really thought she wanted to reach anyone, but she let slip that when making the videos she thinks of two specific clients, both female with injuries that she wants to help and I think that might be who her target demographic is even if she doesn’t recognize it.
We found out who she wants to be a hero to, young women with injuries.
We found out how she wants to be a hero to them by teaching them to move.
We found out what kind of product she wants to create, an online program to help people exercise at home.
Then we did some competitor analysis to see what Zoe’s counterparts were doing, and we found out that they all have online classes/programs and that’s what we want to do too. Functional patterns has a personalization quiz too and that stood out to us as something that could be interesting to explore.
From there we proceeded to the user interviews. They all seemed to find their workouts on social media, following influencers they liked, many of them used apps to work out during the pandemic, and most were reluctant to spend money on such programs. The reason for their reluctance seemed to be that they could just find their exercise routines online and had no need to pay because it wouldn’t be tailored to them anyway. We also found that most of the people interviewed were working out because of injury or pain or to fight future pain.
From there we extracted information to synthesize an affinity diagram to organize what we got out of the interviews and came up with groups of information:
Apps
Online coaches
Offline coaches
Free sources of information
Personal affiliation to sports
Physical pain
Money
We focused on the pain and certain comments about personalized experiences and work outs.
We then organized these thoughts into an empathy map.
Define
Now it was time to create our user persona, Consistent Claire.
Claire works in advertising and cycles to work, she knows that aging has health effects and already feels pain from a bad experience doing an exercise. She knows exercising has positive effects in fighting back the pains she feels but she has a hard time fitting an exercise routine in her schedule and has a hard time staying motivated. She needs to find a way to make exercising fit to her needs.
With that it was time to see how Claire’s typical journey with fitness plays out in a user journey map.
We found that it’s a bumpy ride with mostly lows and some false hope in the middle: injury, frustration, hope, relapse, acceptance and salvation. Finding the right exercise routine that fits you is hard. Acceptance sometimes feels like the easy way out, but using Zoe’s online fitness program that specializes in fighting pain and rehabilitation Claire could work on her specific needs at her own convenience. With that thought we had our problem statement.
“Adults over 35 with a busy schedule need to find a way to do consistent workouts and keep motivated because they understand that they need to improve their current condition.”
Having figured that out, we now moved onto ideation.
Ideation
We started off with a MoSCoW map to figure out what we definitely needed and what we didn’t.
We realized early on that Claire needed a personalized routine for her specific injuries and pain that she wants to fight off so that was a must. We could come up with an online app for exercise on the go, to use on the phone but that was outside of the scope of the project. We thought it could be interesting, based on our interview with Zoe, to have some related but not necessarily directly fitness oriented information to help with the lifestyle, recipes or a blog. We knew that Zoe wasn’t interested in selling apparel or other products. With that we also knew what we were selling, personalized routines and that was our MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
We need to develop a website that offers personalized routines for new and current students with specific physical pains, needs and wants.
From there we moved on to the sitemap.
Zoe’s new site had to do everything it could without being obnoxious direct users to the MVP while still being professional and trustworthy.
From there we had a basis to form our userflow to insist on sending users to the MVP.
From here it was time to prototype.
Prototype
We first started off with some crazy 8s, that is to say we all drew 8 images each in 8 minutes to get the creative juices flowing. As usual I crumbled under pressure but we got some good things out of it. From their we moved on to the first lo-fi prototype.
(I’m writing this some time after the fact but I’m pretty sure Ueide did these. I’ll work with him again and I think I recognize his work now.)
You get on the landing page and you are immediately greeted with a call to action to book an online class, our mvp, and if you explore the site to satisfy your curiosity about Zoe and her method and testimonials you are never too far from a similar button. The introductory forms you fill out to determine what exercises are best suited for you are straightforward and simple enough and then you land on a page with the exercises for you to do and a button to pay for premium content. We thought it was fool proof.
Then we got to a part what is immediately becoming one of my favorite things to do, it was time for testing. Testing is different from interviews in that you don’t know what you want to hear, you have to try and give as little input as possible as you encourage the user to speak their mind and probe them further when they say interesting things. It was a lot of fun and from that we got several interesting notes, the most interesting I think was that there wasn’t a clear difference between the online classes and the in person classes. Which is very important considering Zoe is not taking on new clients in person. From there we did some work and moved onto the mid-fidelity page.
From there it was another fun round of testing.
We got some good feedback.
About the onboarding quiz, it felt too impersonal, so we made some changes to reflect on that.
Many users stated again that they felt overwhelmed with the content.
There continues to be confusion about the difference between the online course and the in person courses
We also noticed that users seemed to gravitate too much to the in-person courses which Zoe is not interested in providing more of right now.
And with that it was time to get to the high fidelity prototype, but before we could get to that it was time to play with some new concepts, such creating a mood board.
I think we struggled a lot with this, I think some people in the team thought it had to be much more literal than it had to be, too many pictures of people working out which gave off the impression that Zoe was all about creating muscle mass and losing weight, but we ultimately came up with one that I think I was mostly satisfied with. I wonder what kind of image selection tool other people use because I felt very limited with unsplash.
From their we moved onto creating a style tile to use, which I think was mostly Ueide’s doing, I had no eye for color and fonts but I think he does.
Now and only now we got to the high fidelity prototype.
And now back to testing.
We heard back from users and found that some of the issues we had before came back to haunt us, but thankfully most of what we learned this time was new.
It still felt a little to impersonal
Users were unsure of whether this was a company or a person.
It would be nice if this were an app (an old point, interesting but outside the scope of the project).
But a lot of nice feedback too about how they liked that everything was on the homepage, the ease of use, the quiz itself. I’m not going to pat ourselves too much on the back but I think while there were some points we could improve upon if we continued on to work on this project I think we can at least say we were somewhere along the right track.
Final thoughts
It was a more comprehensive project than last time, we did a lot more figma work than before. I wasn’t great at figma but I think I’m learning. I did find out that I love testing though. I loved working on the mood board and (spoiler alert) I’m going to have a blast with it in my next project. I’m thinking more and more that Ux is where I feel the most at home. I think I can say this time the subject was completely uninteresting to me but I still enjoyed myself a lot so maybe Ux/Ui is the field for me after all but only time will tell.
My team mates Ueide, Jacob and Nicolas are currently working on their portfolios and I’ll link to them when they are finished so you can read about it from their perspective if you are interested.