It requires building and maintaining a network of local gym/facility owners, contacts at high schools, and college athletic programs, who own or manage available space.
This process is inefficient and happens offline. There are sports programs and individuals looking for gym space, and facility owners who have availability, but both parties don’t know how to find each other, negotiate rates, and seamlessly handle scheduling and reservations.
Research and Analysis
Sketches
Wireframes & Prototype
Design
Usability testing
For athletic coaches, personal trainers, and individuals to find gyms to run their respective businesses, or for leisure.
Gym owners have unused spaces that sit empty over half the time, but most customers don't know about it, and there isn't a solution that bridges that gap.
I interviewed eight individuals, a mix of gym owners/managers (the seller) and trainers/coaches (the buyer) who fit my target user profile, to understand their needs, motivations, and behaviors.
The end user can't easily find information about available gyms, however, the seller has unused space with no solution to attract more customers.
With the feedback from the interviews, I created an affinity map to uncover themes, a detailed persona, user-flows, prioritized functionality/features, and made initial sketches of my proposed solution.
"No one ever knows where to find information on what is out there, without calling 100 people"
"There are so many unused gyms and people just don’t know about them"
Age 35
Lives in Rockford Illinois
Single parent with a 6 year old son
College graduate
Former high school basketball player
Full time youth basketball skills coach
Find information about available gyms in the area.
Easily reserve and pay for gyms.Information about rates and availability listed online.
Maintains a list of contacts at local gyms and park districts.
Travels a lot to regional basketball tournaments with his AAU team - especially in the spring and summer.
Often works long days and weekends.
Lack of information on what gyms have availability.
Losing access to previously reserved basketball courts at park districts because of public events.
"There are so many unused gyms and people just don’t know about them"
There isn’t a single directory/website that has information on sports facilities available for rent.
A mobile first web app to test and validate the idea -
which seems like a simple solution, but it is also very important to make sure an early MVP addresses the core needs of the end user.
I prioritized a simple User Experience with minimal to no on-boarding required to help the user dive into the product.
Most of them serve as an online brochure for the facility with barely any information to help the user accomplish their desired goal - reserve a gym.
None of them let you make a reservation online.
Park District with basketball courts for rent.
Lists rates but can't make reservations online.
Multi purpose indoor space available for athletic events.
No pricing information.
An online marketplace for fitness professionals to rent gyms, is similar to Gympass, but does not include sports facilities - basketball gyms, soccer fields.
A clean user interfaced prioritizing the user's goals.
This iteration focuses on the sellers user experience.
Testing uncovered user's desire to make multiple reservations at the same time
I conducted remote usability tests with 5 new users, and delved a little deeper into their experience with renting a gym and evaluating opengym as a solution.
Planning out an entire season of practice or training sessions.
Booking multiple spaces in different gyms on the reservation?
I redesigned the checkout to flow to make it easier to choose multiple time slots from different gyms into a single reservation, and also make them recur as needed.
I added a My Reservations feature that acts like an online cart, allowing users to add book multiple reservations in one go.
The prototype was designed and tested with basketball gyms. I need to include with other indoor and outdoors sports facilities and flesh out potential differences in users expectations, build out the userflow and onboarding experience for the seller (gym owners and managers).
