Equinox Plus prides itself in being the authority on fitness and training. To support this, the digital experience would need features that help users to maximize their physical potential. We would leverage the expertise of our partner brand instructors to craft an experience that brings personal training to the digital experience. Success was defined as 10% of users completing one of these four-week and complete at least 50% of all program recommended activities.

The business goals were largely based on marrying the digital and the physical experience. We'd also need to see re-engagement with the programs feature and users would need to see improvement improvement to keep coming back.

Personalizing the experience to each user would be a market differentiator. Program templates would be assigned based on individual fitness goals. Intensity would ensure users were being safely challenged, and assigning preferred fitness categories would help users stay engaged with the curriculum.

Onboarding would be the first touchpoint of data collection and personalization for an individualized curriculum. The onboarding process would ask questions about fitness goals, lifestyle habits, and end with a brief physical assessment. This flow would be necessary in lieu of more complicated ML processes like collecting wearable healthkit data or dynamically recommending activities based on history.

Programs would get prominent positioning on the top of the homepage as well as have its own place in the training tab with more details. The homepage card— being essentially a passive advertisement— would need to be simple and straightforward, using large H2 type and minimal copy to educate and intrigue a user at a glance.

Programs are big. They're four weeks of daily activities and an important business driver for the product. We wanted to introduce users to programs in a fashion as grand as the experience. Combining a full screen overlay with immersive video and directive headline copy helps to set expectation of the scale of programs.

One of the popular concerns with the onboarding flow was that it would a cumbersome process. Being considerate of this, I leveraged gamification and interaction best practices— like swiping and screen to screen transitions— to cognitively engage the user and lower perceived time spent.

Question 1 asks about top fitness goals. A users top fitness goal choice is directly linked to the program template they receive. In user testing, users had a difficult time choosing one top fitness goal, so we allowed this to be a ranked choice system. In later iterations, we would be able to use those responses to recommend different Goal-Based-Program curricula after finishing.

Each program template offers a balance of the high level fitness categories— Cardio, Strength, and Recovery. Each activity modality maps to one or two of those higher level categories. If a user specifies that they prefer Cycling to Running classes, we’ll serve them more Cycling classes in the cardio category. This keeps the user excited about their program curriculum and more likely to engage.

The physical assessment would ask the user to perform four basic tasks that would tell us and the personalization engine enough information about full body strength and cardiovascular health to appropriately and safely assign curriculum to the user.

We wouldn’t want users to leave the app to open their stop watch app, only to come back and find their session had timed out. We'd need to create a time based interaction nested in this progression. To solve for this, we would isolate the timer interaction once activated, and the user could only proceed or go back once they exited the timer interaction.

Communicating with engineers is important to accomplish the desired effects. Prototypes were built in principle and formal documentation, specifically regarding motion specs would be vital to accomplishing the brand’s elegant, wafting animations.

When a user has completed their assessment, they're shown their results. Each task has a level between 1 and 3 at which the user performed, resulting in an average grade. Program activities have 3 intensities ranging from beginner to advanced and would be assigned a subset depending on their assessment level.

With the intake process complete, a user has now set all of the personalization ingredients for their programs. In future iterations, we would look to automate this process by recognizing biometrics and past activities.

The user is given their program template and a preview of the four-weeks they have ahead of them, including a weekly breakdown, equipment needed, and a list of activities for their first of their four week program.

Partnering with expert trainers taught us a lot about fitness behaviors— for example, the importance of active days. Users risk strain and even injury if they weren’t careful about planning their active days, so we would gently recommend they not stack their days if they did so at this step.

Finally, a user is presented with a health declaration and upon completing is give the enrollment animation. They are then left at the calendar, where they can see their entire program schedule for the week.

Ultimately, programs is a passive experience. Users are told which classes to take, complete them, and otherwise don’t have much incentive to actively seek their progress. To ensure that users were grounded in their program, following the completion of a program session the user would be taken to the calendar, where an animation would highlight their program’s change in progress.

What started as curiosity blossoms into familiarity. To differentiate between program classes and other activities, we would add the identifying icon seen on the training tab next to any class that was associated with a program’s curriculum.

Making sure we were empowering users with the tools they needed to stay on track would be crucial to our completion goals. To do this we’d leverage tools that are already closely integrated in their lives. Part of the MVP requirements would be enabling users to sync their Equinox+ calendars.

For the users who opted not to sync their calendars, the Equinox+ app would send daily push notification to ensure they were reminded of their tasks for the program.

When surveying users who had used similar products and personal training, one of the main pain points was rigidity of curriculum. Most users said they wouldn’t complete an activity they weren’t interested in. To ensure participation, we gave users a function to swap their daily program session with an activity they preferred.

When the program is in progress, the ‘My Program’ tab on the Training page becomes your Program Hub— your home for status tracking and administrative function for all active and past programs.

Users receive their program recap either actively (when they complete their final class of the week) or passively (when the user misses their final class of the week and are served with a push notification).