SideKcK is a project I have been leading and organiz since 2016 spring. The user request came form myself originally. It is challenging for me to follow workout plans consistently, so I try to find a way to solve this problem. A study result from Indiana University caught my eye, the rate of dropping out workout decreased from 43% to 6.3% when with a gym buddy!

Quickly I found my first and second partner then set up an online survey to gather how people think about gym buddy. We received around 60 feedbacks.70.7% of interviwee believe and experience the merit side of gym buddy. However, 74.1% still workout alone. Why? The top 3 reasons are time mismatch, shy to ask for help and want to find higher training level gym buddy.

Based on all the data we received, my team tried to build a workflow. The main route is to join a workout plan of the neighbor gym buddy's. The user can post their invitations to ask others to join. The rest branches to support these two, like where to save and search my workout plans, how to communicate with others, and add friends inside the app. After these works, wireframe and the first prototype designed. Programmers joined the team. Stebertemper 28th 2016, SideKcK is on the Apple Store!

After interior debugging and fixing, we hold an offline event on April 28th, 2017 in a gym located at Time Squares, NYC. It is an opportunity for us to introduce SideKcK. In the meanwhile, a perfect chance to user testing. Iusses surfaced.

The primary issue I found in this round of testing is that multiple-entries of creating plans confused users so slow down the whole workflow. Another one is that how to search a workout with query conditions. The last but not the least is how to find joined upcoming workout plans. For optimizing these issues, I redesigned the workflow.

For confirming the redesign results, an A/B testing. We invited 12 testers from 20 to 25 years old and both male and female. Workout history is up to 5 years is one of the constraints as well. Oversea students and bilinguals.

Below are my subjects for testing:

1. The time it taks to post a workout plan.

2. The time it taks to understand labels.

3. The time it taks to explore the menu.

4. The number of questions tester ask when they go through 1-3.

5. Why they ask the questions in step 4.

6. What is their expectation of each page before seeing it?

The result shows markable improvement in efficiency of posting and joining a workout, as well as a reduction in users' confusion.

After each of testing round, I update our design specification document for developers.

However, remove the workout library cause users feel insecurity when they try to join a workout post. How to set up the trust relationship is the next challenge for me.