Anytime Fitness + Stronger U Nutrition

Customer Experience + User Experience + Product Design

Position Overview

As the Customer Experience Design Strategist on Anytime Fitness' Innovation Team, I collaborated with analysts, designers, and partnership managers to evaluate existing offerings and identify opportunities for future value additions. Initially, our focus was on exploring technology partnerships in the fitness and physical therapy sectors.

I pivoted into Anytime Fitness' recently acquired Stronger U Nutrition, a company specializing in remote coaching, macro counting, and lifestyle change pilot program . Their acquisition complemented and enhanced Anytime Fitness' existing brand pillars. After a successful 4-month UX research project assessing AF + SU's partnership, our innovation team transitioned into Stronger U's Product Department.

With Stronger U, I took on the role of Design Strategist and Product Designer for their digital services, focusing on refining existing tools and prototyping new offerings.

My Contributions

During my tenure at Anytime Fitness, a significant portion of my role involved conducting research and mapping the customer journey within the AF + SU cross-company pilot program. I led workshops and spearheaded research efforts that included customer journey mapping, user experience surveys, and interviews. This research helped identify critical pain points in the product experience, leading to actionable recommendations for improvement.

These efforts contributed to a remarkable 370% increase in pilot members converting to stronger U's core product in the subsequent pilot and highlighted the need for cross organizational continuity before expanding the pilot program, potentially saving millions of dollars.

Upon transitioning to the Stronger U team, my focus shifted to designing solutions that addressed these identified painpoints. This involved auditing and making recommendations for the website, designing a e-learning course, an advanced intake questionnaire- enhancing member data capture. These initiatives led to improved data collection, more accurate coach to customer matching, and personalizing coaching experiences through the design of new coaching dashboard tools.

These efforts laid the groundwork for a 30% increase in customer retention and an 11% increase in customer satisfaction with the core product year over year, with an estimated revenue growth of $500,000

Anytime + Stronger U Pilot Program

Customer Experience Research

Anytime Fitness acquired Stronger U in order to offer a nutrition coaching service to their gym members. After 2 lackluster pilot programs, I was brought in to do the first experience audit and research initiative, yeilding important results.
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To begin, the numbers were the main problem as a 12% conversion rate of customers from the pilot trial period to full membership in the nutrition coaching program was far below expectations.

Low NPS and CSAT scores from pilot members needed to be investigated and followed up on. Despite initial engagement and participation, a significant number of customers were not continuing their membership beyond the trial period. We needed to understand their journey, uncover barriers, and boost conversion rates.

The objective was clear - Dive into the customer experience during the trial phase, identify pain points, and develop strategic solutions for higher conversions and an engaging nutrition coaching program within the Anytime Fitness customer base.

The Objective

Project Launch

12% conversion rate
Customer drop off - 30% never messaged their coach, 78% did not finish the 30 day trial
Expectation setting and training was lacking in both the B2B Anytime/Stronger U to franchisee relationship but also in the B2B2C franchisee to gym member sales process, resulting in a breakdown in communication at all levels and between all stakeholders

Key Challenges

The Problems

Conduct thorough research and analysis of the customer journey of the pilot trial
Survey and interview pilot program participants and stakeholders
Identify pain points, barriers, and opportunities to capture and retain customers
Utilize the Jobs to be Done framework to identify product gaps
Work collaboratively with the Stronger U Member Experience Team, Anytime Fitness Operations, Franchisees, and coaches to understand expectations and outcomes
Recommend data-driven strategies and personalized interventions to engagement and retention
Create actionable insights and deliver a comprehensive report outlining findings and proposed solutions and utilize PowerBI to modeled pricing structures, bundling packages, and lifetime value calculations

The Scope

The Work

The customer experience was very inconsistent. To begin with, many of the franchisees had included this pilot as part of a bundle, while others sold it separately, muddying our data from the beginning. The signup process required a password reset AND a customer service phone call just to get logged into the app. Our technology was working against us from the beginning.
Once they were in the system, it was up to a week before a coach was assigned to them. Anytime Fitness' target market focuses the low-mid level convenient neighborhood gym users. Stronger U is a premium service catering to an experienced fitness crowd. There was a large gap in nutrition knowledge and coach - member relatability. 86% of our respondents wanted a coach that felt relatable. Only 60% felt their coach was a good match for them.
Poor expectation setting was a core theme. Members were not qualified at the point of sale. Stronger U's customer intake form was painfully under capturing relevant data. And coaches were not provided the customer data or the tools to succeed.
50% of pilot members loved the program, 50% didn't understand what they'd signed up for or were being asked to do.
Cost was the biggest barrier to conversion. 78% of users who completed the trial didn't sign back up because it was too expensive. The Stronger U product cost - on average - twice as much as all of their other monthly fitness expenses combined.

Findings

The Customer Journey

Pause all pilot expansion plans and focus on fixing foundational issues before repiloting.
Consumer Feedback Loops: Seek feedback after pivitol touchpoint on their journey. After signup, onboarding, and exit/conversion. Utilize NPS and CSAT surveys to benchmark experience improvements. ‍
Franchisee Feedback Loops: Reports that allow for visibility into member's progress, and relevant KPI's
Coach Feedback Loops: Survey and benchmark coach experience. Link SU and AF coaches toward a holistic health and fitness experience.th
Qualify Members: Sign the right people up at the right time, incentivize the Club's duty to get people into the pilot program and then convert.
Intake Form: Capture data that is relevant to the drop off points found in the study - coaching expectations, personalization, previous experiences, tech hurdles, and learning styles.
Coaching Tools: Standardize the coaching experience, arm them with the resources and data that allow them to easily work with multiple customer personas and overcoming common complaints.
Create a Stronger U Product Ecosystem: Create multiple tiers of products that a customer can ladder up and down based on their knowledge/experience or budget.

Recommendations

Room to Improve

Reflections

Artifacts and Proposals

An assignment such as this has a lot to unpack. A square peg in a round hole doesn't quite cover how a newly acquired business, a B2C service rebranded as aB2B product and then into a B2B2C service, accountability and oversight issues galore, and complex technology problems created a perfect storm and frustrated many smart and dedicated people on all levels. Myself included.

Having been the first CX/UX researcher on this project allowed me to shed light on many of the difficulties - and wins - this program was going through when AF'a Innovation Team joined the foray.

In hindsight, this project led to a lot of organizational change, and was not only the North Star for all my future work, but also stressed to Anytime Fitness the potential risk of taking a premature pilot program from 50 gyms to over 5,000.

Soon after, we joined the Stronger U product team to work on these foundational issues and level up their nutrition service and tools for successful scaling and growth.

Website UX

Stronger U's Marketing Director approached me with a problem: we were receiving between 10k to 17k unique visits each month but only signing up 100-300 new members to our product. A 1% to 1.7% conversion rate was way too low. I was asked to do a UX audit of our website.
I analyzed our layout and information hierarchy, comparing it to our target market, pulling user survey and interview data, and performing a heuristic analysis. "A bunch of marketing mumbo-jumbo" was the user quote that struck home. Our clients were educated, affluent, and were looking for a company that spoke to the science behind its methods.
Our page speed analysis and accessability report was in the 70th percentile. Poor contrast, and unstandardized layouts created unnecessarily complicated visual layouts that were difficult to read with too many words. We needed higher contrast - ditch the orange for anything accept accents.
The competition analysis was enlightening. Our biggest competitor - Future.co was the Cadillac of nutrition coaching sites but used minimal science copy in their pitch, while our closest market competitor - Macros Inc was in the same UX boat as we were. We needed some market differentiation and brand messaging work.
My contrbutions came to an end with low fidelity prototyping and detailed recommendations to hand off to our marketing team.
The resulting redesign is accessible, simple, relevant, and increased conversions by 27%

Summary

The Work

Foundations e-Learning Course

User Experience Design

Our customer experience study revealed a demographic of members that had no nutrition education experience, resulting in a very steep learning curve that left 30% of our pilot members feeling like they didn't possess the required level of knowledge to begin the program.
Foundations was aimed at designing a pilot product online course which followed the same guidelines as SU's core product, and utilized a group coaching model with a cohort based social media community to ease new-to-nutrition customers through the steps. We utilized Thinkific's tools to prototype and launch our MVP.
Working with our subject matter experts and coach trainer, I was able to leverage our existing content with minimal modification to create a whole new product. Foundations was 75% automated, only needing the cohort coach to check in a few days per week, reducing coach load by a significant amount.
Potential use cases for the Foundations course were to be the Stronger U + Anytime Fitness partnership, direct to consumer low touch product offers, and new-to-fitness customers.

Scope

The Work

There was a lot to learn with this design sprint. We built a complete, 4 week, 52 module, fully functioning MVP education and community product with 90% existing assets.

Strategically, this was a home run for its ability to appeal to two underserved demographics: new-to-nutrition users, and returning users who wanted a refresher course after the holidays but didn't want to join the 3 month program. Combined with the new intake form assessment of new user nutrition literacy, the potential for increased customer expectations, time-on-product, and overall satisfaction are significant.

Upon my departure, this project was sitting in a holding pattern, awaiting operations review for pilot approval.

Deliverables

Research + Analysis

Coaching Dashboard

Upon joining the SU team, it became obvious the coaching tools were limiting the customer experience. Broken widgets, unsaved data workarounds, (reliable) Excel dashboard clones, and workarounds were the normal.
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We conducted surveys, think aloud walkthroughs, and sought feedback at every level of their digital experience. Early on it became clear that our personalization issues had a lot to do with the coaching dashboard, and if we could improve the coach experience, we could dramatically improve customer satisfaction, NPS, and customer retention.

Coach's Tools

Discovery

(Interactive prototype below)

We built this prototype based on the feedback we received from coaches, use cases, and other existing dashboard design best practices. The goal was to streamline the process but not make it foreign. Simplifying the data fields, we estimated a 70% drop in number of clicks, 85% reduction in back and forth screen navigation, and eliminating the need for 3rd party programs to pick up the slack.

New features included before/after picture comparison, audio, video, picture chat functionality, goal setting/tracking, and membership milestone tracking.

We solicited feedback from coaches and received overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Dashboard Prototype

Research + Prototype

Stronger U's internal customers are the coaches. Their interaction with customers make or break the member experience. When we joined the team, coaches reached out asking for help because they saw their tools having a direct impact on the decreasing Time on Product KPI we were trying to improve.

What we learned, was that this was the project that had been started half dozen times and abandoned to firefight elsewhere. A mountain of tech, design, and data debt had accrued around this product and the costs for a redesign were not palatable for the decision makers at the same time we were doing a complete member app rebuild.

Working with our developers, we identified the quick fixes, improved the UX/UI as much as we could, and focused our resources on other projects.

Reflection

Outcome

Member App Design

Stronger U's existing member application was non-native, essentially a web app placed into a mobile app container. Prior to my joining the product team, Stronger U partnered with a development company to build a brand new native app. The new app was shaping up to be a carbon copy of the existing app which had big UX/UI gaps, luke warm user feedback, and failed to meet accessability standards. We had 4 months until the planned launch.

My roll was to work with our UX designers to fill gaps and focus on high impact improvements.

Scope

Scope + Work

This project was a crash course in the data management and develoment of commercial applications. Our team overcame many obstacles in designing and launching this product that spanned from joining mid build, managing cross-functional/organizational hurdles, and a labyrinthian back end development process. The end result, while not perfect, offered us the opportunity to design the future development work with intention and efficiency in mind. This was a systems and process design win.

The new member app launched onn the App Store and Google Play in October of 2023.

Reflection

Outcome