Tempo Fitness
Envisioning engaging home workouts for young adults.
Timeline: Feb–May 2022
Role: UX/UI designer, UX researcher
Tools: Figma, Miro
Team: Rafi Hanafiah, Kotomi Tanaka, Sonia Redon, David McAllister
How might we design new user experiences to increase Tempo's acquisition and engagement among young adults in the U.S?
Tempo Fitness aims to make strength training accessible and convenient with the release of the Tempo Move, a compact weight system offering real-time feedback in on-demand workout sessions through smart camera and sensor technology.
About this project
Example of a Tempo Move workout in action
In this 4-month-long project, I contributed in all stages from planning and conducting research to delivery, led the final sprint, and kept the team on track to meet goals within time constraints.
PART 01 – RESEARCH
Warming up
What experiences would attract new users? First, find out…
How do users like to work out?
The ideal workout method is affordable, motivating, and highly personalized.
On motivation: Users are motivated by both the workout process itself and the goals they achieve. For example, working out with friends (process) and reaching a satisfying sense of self-improvement (goal).
Next, we held individual studies on campus where students could come and try out the Tempo Move for 15 minutes. None of the students had used a Tempo product before, making them the perfect participants to give us feedback.
A study participant trying the Tempo Move workout system for the first time
Users loved the engaging instructors in the video, its approachability for beginners, and found Tempo’s smart technology a huge advantage over free competitors like YouTube workouts and the school gym. However, all of our participants balked at the price.
With an upfront cost of $495 plus a monthly subscription fee of $39, the Tempo Move is simply not worth it for our target demographic.
To kick off our research, we collected data on how our users work out through a qualitative survey. Then, we identified where the Tempo Move stands and its competition by mapping out the most common workout methods our users mentioned on a matrix:
What could make the Tempo Move worth it?
Tempo Move excels at its convenience, approachability, and form correction technology.
To identify more opportunities for the Tempo Move, we compared its direct competitors as well as its cheaper alternatives in a SWOT analysis, going through product reviews online and breaking down what made each product unique.
Direct competitors included workout products involving equipment + subscription model, such as Peloton, Mirror, Hydrow, Ergatta, and Tonal.
We noticed that many of our competitors had a social aspect in the form of a leaderboard or a virtual friend list to view each other’s progress, but none involved the fun in-person interactions of a physical gym or group workout class.
Returning to our users' workout motivations, we decided to explore the in-person social aspect as a potential solution.
How does working out with friends at home affect user enjoyment?
To explore this direction further, we designed a 3-week group study, installing Tempo Moves in 3 households with 2-4 residents. All residents were expected to use the Tempo Move to workout multiple times a week and fill out a questionnaire post-workout.
Since we weren’t able to find existing users, this study also served to learn about how newly converted users liked the Tempo Move.
At the end of the study, we facilitated group interviews and participatory activities with each household to observe the impact of working out at home in a shared setting. This manifested in 2 main ways:
Shared sense of accountability
Increased motivation among the household
Seeing the Tempo Move in the home led to conversations within household members, and seeing people using the Tempo Move motivated members to work out. Members really wanted to work out together, but weren’t able to due to limitations of Tempo’s technology. Some users would attempt to work out together even though their statistics weren’t tracked!
“[Participant] introduced me to the Tempo…if I didn’t see him I would be less encouraged…seeing him made me want to work out”
We then had participants write love/hate letters to reveal expectations, draw their ideal group Tempo Move experience to visualize how users want to use the Tempo Move in a group setting, and rank a list of features that we had come up with beforehand to gauge desirability.
This casual letter-writing produced some interesting quotes that strengthened our existing insights.
Most storyboards depicted a cooperative experience.
Some showed a competitive, rather than cooperative, experience.
Most storyboards depicted an in-person experience, but one depicted a remote experience.
Users are highly interested in sharing their workout experiences with friends. This goes for beginners to users with more workout experience.
Conversely, users aren't as interested in sharing their personal goals and achievements with a broader community.
From this group study, we were able to identify a key opportunity that could not only differentiate the Tempo Move from its competitors, but potentially make it worth it for our target demographic to purchase.
PART 02 – IDEATING
Kicking into high gear
What kind of users are we designing for?
To guide our ideation, we developed 2 personas from our research who cover a spectrum of potential and existing users. Each persona represents different motivations, concerns, workout preferences, and desires:
Angelica – a newbie motivated by exercising with her friends.
Intimidated by the gym, Angelica is considering purchasing the Tempo Move as a way to work out in the comfort of her own home.
She enjoys group workout classes with her friends, but wants the flexibility of working out any time on her own schedule.
Desires: cooperative and flexible workouts
Rachel – an intermediate-level Tempo user motivated by the thrill of competition.
Rachel has been using the Tempo Move for a few months and has steadily been increasing her weights.
She’s worried about outgrowing the Move after she reaches the highest weight level.
Desires: competitive and challenging workouts
What would motivate Angelica and Rachel?
After freely brainstorming ideas, we narrowed them down based on:
Tempo’s current technology and limitations
How impactful the solution would be relative to its effort to implement
From our selected concepts, we then formed design narratives to model the user experience for Angelica and Rachel.
Results of our brainstorming sessions.
Rough sketch and mockups
PART 03 – DELIVERING SOLUTIONS
The final spurt
Tempo Duet
Group workouts with cooperative and competitive modes. Asynchronous workouts supported.
For Angelica – Tag Team Mode
Users switch on and off the mat for the duration of a workout, cooperating to complete a workout.
Allows for multiple people to share one Tempo Move within existing infrastructure.
Tracks both individual and team statistics.
For Rachel – Face-Off Mode
Users also switch on and off the mat, but try to one-up each other when it's their turn to go.
A ghost mode allows users to view the “ghost” of their friend on their screen after they’ve completed the workout asynchronously.
Mockups of Tempo Duet’s two social modes. Original images from Tempo Fitness.
Answering the initial question
How might we design new user experiences to increase Tempo's acquisition and engagement among young adults in the U.S?
By learning how the perceived value of owning a Tempo Move fell short of expectations of our socially-motivated demographic, we were able to identify opportunities to bridge the gap through cooperative and competitive social features doable within Tempo's current technology.
We presented the solutions to Tempo Fitness's design team in the form of the following visual narratives for each persona. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to get user feedback and further iterate on the rough concepts, but our solutions were well-received and later validated in a survey sent by Tempo.
PART 04 – REFLECTIONS
Winding down
Getting better footing in retrospect
Learnings for the next project
What was Tempo Fitness struggling with? Where were they situated at the time? Were they not meeting their goals? Understanding Tempo’s goals on a higher level by asking better questions would have provided us with a more effective starting point.
Dig into business goals
We spent most of this consultation project on user research, and were able to perform concept validation to some degree during the group interviews. However, we weren't able to flesh out and test our final solutions, which may have been possible if it was prioritized earlier on.
Devote time for testing
From our client and team…
“Angelina did an exceptional job conducting UX research with Tempo and then developing innovative design concepts for how we could address a couple of important unmet needs in our user journey at the time.
In particular, her work helped us understand new potential approaches for creating more of a social workout experience and also for increasing user comprehension of some of our company's core value propositions.
Angelina and her team also helped us gain a deeper understanding of a new potential user segment that could prove a promising growth opportunity for Tempo. I was impressed by her professionalism, ability to conduct various UX research methods, and how she creatively applied UX research into design concepts.”
– Kirby Smith, Lead UX Researcher at Tempo Fitness
“During the Tempo project, Angelina was a hard-working consultant who always took initiative in taking on responsibilities that she believed would move the project forward.
She was willing to go the extra mile on her deliverables, and this was most evident when she prepared a thoroughly planned out weekly agenda for what to achieve during the sprint she was leading.
Overall, I was always able to count on Angelina on doing the work she was responsible for and exceed expectations.”
– Rafi Hanafiah, Berkeley Innovation Project Mentor
Acknowledgements
The Tempo team’s final showcase on campus