Understanding User Needs: Consultation and Persona Development

The core team adopted a user-centered design approach, consulting with a user group of students, staff, and community members. The goal was to gain an understanding of the diverse fitness needs and challenges faced by each user group.

Key insights from user research included:

• Busy Schedules: Users, particularly students and staff, struggled to fit fitness activities into their hectic academic and professional lives.
• Booking options: Booking facility hire or fitness classes required a visit to the centre or a telephone call, both options offered no prior visibility of available booking slots which caused scheduling issues for members.
• Mental Health: Many users expressed a desire for content related to wellness and mental health, recognising the connection between fitness and mental well-being.

To ensure the app design reflected real user needs, the team developed personas representing a typical user:

Persona: Jacob

A postgraduate student juggling coursework, extracurriculars, and part-time work. Jacob considers himself as a casual user, looking to improve his general fitness. Jacob’s fitness goals are to lose some weight and improve his overall body composition by visiting several times a week.

Goals

• Gain his target body composition and weight
• Having a good understanding of what is available at the Centre, to make informed decision about the types of activities, to achieve his goals
• Book and participate in activities that help him meet his fitness goals
• Visit the Centre a minimum amount of times to meet his goals and make good use of his paid membership
• Meet regularity with friends for group fitness activities
• Book facilities at a time that suits him and his close group of friends
• Managing fitness goals around a pre-existing/chronic injuries
• Make good choices based on his physical and mental health needs

The information provided by the user group, guided the persona creation, which in-turn guided the development of key app features, ensuring they directly addressed the unique needs of each user group.

Feature Development to Address User Needs

Based on user research, the core team created a feature list to ensure the app solved the key challenges raised by the personas:

1. Membership Sign-up and Categorisation:
   To remove confusion by the variety of membership types (e.g., student, staff, community), additional development simplified this process to ensure customers were placed on the correct membership category. This feature reduced sign-up confusion and ensured users were accurately categorised.
2. Real-Time Availability and Booking:
   The app allowed users to view the availability of fitness classes, and sports facilities in real time, making it easy to find and book activities. The ability to choose an activity by duration and type helped users select classes that fit their schedules.
3. Mental Health and Wellness Resources:
   Recognizing the link between fitness and mental health, the app directed students and staff to university-provided mental health resources when appropriate.
4. Seamless Building Access:
   The mobile app was integrated with the sports centre’s entry systems, allowing users to scan their mobile devices to gain entry, removing the need for physical fobs. This not only sped up entry but also eliminated the inconvenience of misplaced or forgotten fobs.

Usability Testing and Iterative Improvements

Using a full interactive prototype, the core team conducted usability testing with a small group of representative users (students, staff, and community members). The testing revealed several areas for improvement:

• Button labelling: Initial testing showed that users had difficulty navigating the app to find key features such as booking and membership information. As a result, clearer button labels and a more intuitive navigation flow were added.
• Sign-up process: Users found the membership categorisation feature helpful but still encountered confusion with specific steps in the sign-up flow. Based on this feedback, we simplified the process by reducing unnecessary steps and wrote instructional content clearer.
• Class/Facility hire duration chips: Chip UI elements which aimed to highlight the duration of a fitness class were not clear towards their purpose, the use of additional iconography helped user better understand these functional elements.
• Content length: The vertical length of certain screens caused users to miss key information or took additional time to find key ‘call to action’ buttons. We reduced content by rewriting information to be more concise and improved the hierarchy and ordering of content.

Project Outcomes and Measurable Success

The implementation of the new sports management system, mobile app and improved building access was completed on schedule, just ahead of the new academic year, Sept 24. The results have been overwhelmingly positive:

• Increased participation: The Sports Centre’s strategic aim is to get “more people more active more often”, In the current academic year 1800+ active members are now using the centre, an increase of over 45% over the previous year. Despite the increase in active members the administration of bookings and membership signups have improved through better self-serve functionality online.
• Reduction in Administrative Work: The digital sign-up process reduced paperwork, allowing staff to focus on more operational improvements.
• Restructure to improve member experience: As a result of the operational improvements, the Sports Centre team have restructured staffing to allow for increased centre opening times, increasing capacity for the higher numbers of members and giving more flexibility to customers.