Overview

Orangetheory Fitness is a company with over 1000+ workout studios worldwide. The company wanted the digital agency Publicis Sapient to rethink the site’s UI / UX for their Australian studio, Orangetheory AU™. My work was to support a Senior UX Designer in exploring an optimal web scheduling experience for the site.

Concepts

Before the projects focus was on the AU site, we were tasked to come up with creative ideas for Orangetheory. The goal was to get existing members excited about the brand. An Art Director and I came up with 20+ ideas. From leveraging existing audience behavior, to storming an Air Force facility (Area 51) so that members could workout with aliens.

‍The concept of leveraging existing elements would serve as a foundation for how I would approach design in future projects. As there’s a direct connection between existing ideas and declaring a system through those ideas.As a UX-er, many of my ideas were tactical and would require updates to their app or site. This helped create a larger conversation in the agency’s pitch for a site refresh.

Process

Of course attending a class was the first part of the process. We wanted to make sure the product was good in real life 😉

^{Holding an Orangetheory band post-workout. The band is used to track my fitness data such as heart rate. This data links to a board on the screen showing the BPM for the entire class.}

Information Architecture

Before ideating I wanted to highlight the primary areas of which a site visitor could book a class. This would help me visualize the path from landing on a page to booking a class.

‍I quickly realized that there were way too many steps to achieve one goal. The navigation felt like information overload in that there were 5 potential paths a visitor could take. The path to book a class was also too long. They asked for too much information upfront. The joining page was similar to the Workout Page. I wondered if it would help to consolidate the two pages and name them synonymously.

‍Some suggestions I made based off of the sitemap and IA audit

• Make 1-2 CTA’s clear in the navigation.
• Scheduling comes first, give the visitor what they want.
• Collect upfront information last, that way the visitor has incentivize to input their data.
• Consolidate the Workout Page and Joining Page info.
• Play with different ways to achieve the same goal.

Ideation

We then started ideating on all the possible ways to get visitors to book a free class. The primary CTA’s were “Book Now” and “Schedule a Free Class”. Our output was a board of sticky notes with wacky ideas to get end-users to book a free class.

From that inspiration struck so I began rapid sketching. Since the goal was to get end users to book a free class, much of the explorations focused on unique ways to achieve that. I noticed that their blog and long-form content housed some valuable data, from member reviews to class details. It would have been great to pull that closer to the scheduling experience. This could nurture visitors and create a tease of what-to-expect during the class.

The team then separated into two. Strategy and the Senior Designer focused on the Orangetheory AU homepage while I focused on the web scheduling experience. I did a competitor audit and gathered inspiration from sites like Dribbble, Siteinspire and Awwwards. From that I created a UI mood-board with boutique fitness studio styles, and elements that supported class scheduling.

From a competitor perspective, Equinox had a leading web experience. The team liked Equinox as an example because of how clean, multi-faceted and unified the experience was. Additionally, the brand is global with 350,000+ members, yet they still feel exclusive in their UX.

Conclusion

This work became an exercise in identifying the nuance by pulling in the better parts of competitor sites. Orangetheory could use an interface-lift to elevate their digital branding. Unlike competitors who gave a more exclusive feel despite being global and having many members.

The Orangetheory Fitness site UX and branding has largely stayed the same across all locations. Honestly I learned how tough it is to make impact in such a large establishment. Partly because if something’s working, why fix it? The other part being, you can’t boil the ocean.

If I had more time I would have spent that testing UX and UI explorations to create a business case for updating the UX/UI.

In conclusion, I love fitness. So regardless of the outcome, it’s always great to work on a project that supports a lifestyle that I believe in.