health + Wealth = Whealth

Helping people earn back their health

Background

How much does your gym membership/fitness class cost per month?  $100?  On average a monthly fitness subscriber in Seattle, WA pays between $55 and $210/month to have a fitness membership!  We took data from a range of Seattle area gyms, and fitness studios, and found out:  If you go to the gym 30 times per month, that is only $3.33/day to have a membership...if you go every day…  If you go as many as 10 times per month your cost is $10/day.  You may have crunched these numbers and regardless of how often you do or do not go to the gym, you will always pay money to go to the gym.   

Whealth wants you to earn your money back for going to the gym!

My Role  

I developed the concept for the website and pitched the idea to our team of designers and developers.  I helped conduct research to support my business model, and performed user-tests with our low and high-fidelity prototypes.  My team elected me to deliver the pitch to our stakeholders during the presentation.    

About

The Project:  During my course at General Assembly, I participated in a juried Hackathon that joined designers with developers to create a website.  The prompt is:  create an idea for a Seattle Startup that can be monetized.

Deliverables:  My team of two developers and four designers completed the challenge and produced an original business model, a coded site, original branding, research, and user-testing in 24 hours.

Tools and Process:  Our design team and our development team had the opportunity to use new learned skills at a rapid-fire pace to make sure we had enough time to ideate, research, design, develop test, and present in 24 hours.

The Solution:  Whealth is an web site dashboard for a disruptive business model that rewards gym-members with cash for going to the gym!  By incentivizing gym members to go to the gym more often, we empower our users to stay fit, and use the subscription that they have paid for.  Gyms and fitness centers will save money and maintain customer satisfaction, and see a higher rate of return members over the course of the year.     

Research  

Gyms try to attract people who won't come:  During our rapid fire research session, my team sent out a quick user survey to see who has a gym membership, and what their experience is like.  Our web-research yielded a lot of results on Incentive Theory, and reward motivation that research that told us that gym memberships bank strongly on users not going to the gym.  Human behavioral psychology says that gyms are constantly cycling through members, and struggle to retain members for longer than 4 month at a time.  

"Money is also an excellent example of an external reward that motivates behavior. In many cases, these external rewards can motivate you to do things that you might otherwise avoid such as chores, work, and other tasks you might find unpleasant." -VeryWell.com

Design

Branding:  Giving our site a custom color scheme and brand was something we were excited to accomplish on such a quick timeline.  We conducted user-tests to determine if the logos we produced represented our brand.  Users said chose the blue logo because it felt strong, and reliable, yet fun and approachable.      

Paper Prototypes and rapid iterations:  My team and I began our site design with hand drawn wireframes, and after conducting a user survey and researching other web layouts, we began user-testing and landed on our principal assets for our MVP dashboard.  The dashboard displays days that the user has gone to the gym, and what their earnings balance, and how they would like to distribute their funds:  redeem their cash toward their next month's membership bill, or a direct deposit to their bank account.      

User-Testing

We completed five rounds of user-testing to test both our site branding, and our layout options.  Based on other health sites, and apps, we pulled a variety of charts and graphs that show a person's gym attendance, and their cash-earning progress.  The most popular features were built into our final app.

The Pitch:  We pitched out design and business model to a panel of four industry professionals who labeled our project as the most disruptive business model presentation of the day.  Our developers gave a demonstration of the dashboard view for two unique users.  A great success!  

What I Learned

 I learned how to work directly with web developers on a web design project.  It was wonderful to practice design communication between developers and designers.  I learned the importance of branding, and typography in a design.  Most importantly, I learned that the innovation of a new app in 24 hours with hard-working people is exciting, challenging, and really fun!