ATHLETE KIOSK
an end-to-end product design project for RepOne Strength
* This case study represents work I completed before leaving the company around a year before launch, and does not represent the final product.
Product requirements
Keeping athletes informed while they’re lifting
RepOne Strength is a weightroom analytics platform created by Squats & Science that expands its previous barbell velocity tracking system, OpenBarbell, into a team setting. Coaches use RepOne’s Coach Portal to assemble and deliver training programs to their athletes via the Athlete Kiosk tablet app, which also shows athletes how they're performing based on hardware feedback.
Our aim for the Athlete Kiosk was to balance athletes' natural lifting and logging patterns, with adequately informing athletes what's coming next and how they're currently performing. We also had to account for a majority of the teams we serve having athletes share a rack, and learn how to handle workouts in a general enough way to satisfy a variety of training methodologies.
Finally, a major hurdle was ensuring athletes could quickly correct mis-attributed sets and incorrectly logged lifts without breaking the momentum of a lifting session.
Coach interviews
No two teams train the same way
Before designing, I interviewed around 50 strength coaches and team admins ranging in level from high school to MLB and NFL to learn about how they conduct their teams’ training sessions. From these conversations, I determined that warmup methods and athlete-grouping methods are truly unique from team to team.
For the kiosk, we set a minimum velocity threshold between warmup sets and work sets, which lets coaches prescribe a range of warmup methodologies, on the assumption that all warmups are lighter than working sets. As for sharing training stations, we let users log themselves in instead of pre-assigning to handle all types of arrangements.
User flow created by synthesizing insights from coach interviews and athlete observations. Click to enlarge.
Athlete observation
A defined rhythm exists in solo athletes’ sets
RepOne’s office was fortunate enough to share space with the gym they owned, which allowed us to watch OpenBarbell users and RepOne pilot testers whenever we want. Thus, a lot of observations I gleaned from watching these athletes helped me understand a strength athlete’s perspective and compare it to a coach’s mindset.
Unlike the coach interviews, observing and interviewing OpenBarbell users painted a clear, singular picture of how athletes integrate their sessions with technological trackers. It highlighted the value of pre-lift mental preparation, revealed where in the order of operations athletes log data, gave a sample of rest periods and what session flow is like, and an insight into how athletes interact with other trainees nearby.
Wireframes of initial UI concepts — while attribution and correction was handled decently, the UI here did not ultimately match the natural order of an average weightlifting session.
User interface design
A vertical timeline for tracking progress
Based on these insights and resultant user flow, I settled on the metaphor of a waterfall for the UI, assigning each set to a card. Upcoming sets are listed in a row on top of the screen, allowing for reordering if sets are somehow out of order. The current set is displayed below, with an animation showing how athletes are meeting velocity targets in real-time. On the bottom of the screen is the set history, allowing for realistic post-lift tracking, and allowing for error correction without interrupting the real-time performance updates above.
Motion interface
Animation as a real-time status indicator
Since RepOne uses lift velocity to measure success and performance (via included hardware), it’s important that athletes know in real time whether they’re meeting their goals or if they need to move faster. I used the boldest, least subtle animation possible I could possibly come up with so that the athlete knows how they’re doing by either looking at their tablet out of the corner of their eye, or by having their teammates inform them from the sidelines, all without breaking their focus in either case.
