Glofox

Glofox is SAAS startup founded in 2013 who builds business management software for the fitness industry. Being created by ex-athletes and studio owners who have seen the pains first hand, they have ambitions to create a platform that frees fitness professionals to focus on what they do best rather than the tedious admin work that comes with running a small business.

They understand the importance of a great user experience and have hired me to take charge of their efforts.

After months of speaking to users, exploration, failures and successes, I created a new interface and design system that served Glofox well for many years.

Getting Started

I started this project, with a thorough conversation with the stakeholders about what the company's goals are, how we hope to achieve them, what was tried in the past and what assumptions we're making. It's important that we are all on the same page before diving in.

Talking to people in the company: I spend a good deal of my time learning from the knowledge that different departments in the company have about our users, how we might best help them, and the challenges they face.

Talking to users: We are designing software for people who aren't us so the best products are those designed by companies who understand their users intimately. I gained a lot of valuable insights observing fitness professionals use either our product or alternative solutions in the real world. I asked them to rank Glofox features based on how valuable they are and how frequently they use them, asked them to walk me through how they achieve certain goals and took notes. I also did interviews over the phone and had a look at the available analytics.

I learned what the product's strengths and weakness were and came to understand a great deal about what features are most important to our users and why. I learned most of our users see Glofox as the backbone of their business and would be happy to go through a steeper learning curve if this means they get a more powerful product.

I understood how important building personal relationships with members is to our users and also the extent to which they can benefit from having actionable insights about the day to day operations of their studios.

Problems Identified

A good example of a flow that most users reported as confusing and problematic was booking a member into a class, which was previously done by searching for the member they wanted to book, pressing a vague icon (with no label), being taken to the page where they usually edit their classes and pressing a new book button next to the class they wanted. Users would then be taken back to the dashboard, where a pop-up with the details of the booking would appear. If they got something wrong, they would have to cancel and start over.

You can have a look at the original design here.

Exploring Ideas

Once I got a good sense of the problems our users are trying to solve andhow our product is helping or failing to help them, I started exploring ideas. Because of the urgency of the redesign (we were losing users because of all the problems the old interface had), I decided to spend less time than I normally would in the exploratory stages and revisit everything once the fires were out.

The redesign

After exploring and validating several ideas, restructuring, redesigning and optimising I created the first version of the new dashboard interface.

Here are some of the improvements I made:

Impact & Reception

The interface was very well received by users, with many of them going out of their way to write us thank you emails for starting to invest in user experience and helping solve the problems they faced every day.

As a result of this project, we noticed:

Monitoring feedback

Once we started implementing the interface, I also installed Amplitude and Hotjar so we can track its performance properly and added a custom feedback widget I designed that was triggered after several actions asking users whether they found that easy to do or not.

I also continued to refine the interface based on the feedback we received from users. There was also a lot of optimisation work around labels or micro-interactions such as getting some headers to stick to the top when scrolling.