Building fitness community with social app features
An in-app community for fitness lovers
Gymshark Training
Product Designer
Feature add to existing mobile app
Concept
•
UX
•
UI
3 weeks
A stronger, more solid community
The ability to connect and build a support system within the app empowers users to cheer each other on, share victories, and overcome challenges together, supercharging motivation, both internal and external, to crush their fitness goals while enjoying the process. The new social features aim to
80%
DAU
80%
Number of fitness buddies
60%
Quicker to break PB's
Gymshark is a fitness apparel brand with a vision to unite the fitness community
Since launched in 2012, England-based Gymshark thrived with their robust social media marketing with the help of influencers, athletes, and fitness icons, building up a massive following across all platforms. Building on top of their success, Gymshark released their own training app in August 2019 to offer an extensive library of workouts, workout tracking, training tips and fitness plans. As a brand who takes pride in community, surprisingly, the training app absolutely failed their fans. Where’s the community in the app?!
App launch promo: Gymshark Central, Aug 22 2019.
Connect, motivate, and compete
To integrate social features without disrupting the existing focus on workouts, I designed the 'Community' menu, offering a 'Feed' for social interactions, a 'PBs' tab for motivation and progress tracking, and a 'Challenge' tab for friendly competitions, all while maintaining a clean and intuitive interface and experience.
Home screen with community activities
See friends’ fitness updates
See all the challenges in one single tab
Train together. Win together.
“Fitness is a very social thing!” Build fitness circles with workout buddies.
Add friends via phone contacts, social media accounts, or QR code
Select contacts to add
See updates from top friends first
Battling it out with friends
From what I heard in the user interviews, participating in fitness challenges with friends is immensely beneficial in both building a community and providing the extra push to run faster, climb higher, and bike further.
Join a community challenge or create your own
Customize your own fitness challenge
Track all participants’ progress
Merging the gym with the app
The next step in nurturing a community is to enable users to have more different interactions with others and with the app. I would like to explore features that expand user profiles, provide live streams of communities activities, and facilitate workout sessions scheduling among communities. I’m interested to collaborate with Gymshark to bring this concept work to life if the opportunity arises. After all, this is what community is about.