Kickoff: Automation Tool Redesign

As the founding designer, I worked closely with the founder/CEO and CTO as well as coaches to redesign a more intuitive tool for coaches to schedule workouts for their clients. We prioritized and planned the deployment of different aspects of the feature over time, to allow earlier access to the enhancements, a win win for the capacity of the development team and for retaining coaches and their clients.

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The Goal

How might we make the Auto Scheduler (A-S) intuitive and informative so that more coaches confidently adopt it to streamline workout planning and scale their client base?

By surfacing relevant information to coaches at every step of the auto-scheduling process, reducing complexity by designing out avoidable errors we can help coaches make informed decisions. By clearly communicating the function of the A-S as saving and rotating workouts similar to a subscription service, and by integrating flexibility for ad hoc customization, we made a more intuitive experience for coaches overall that gave them the confidence that Kickoff will support them to meet their clients' needs over the long term.

The Industry

Kickoff is an early stage startup providing an asynchronous two-sided marketplace for coaches to meet clients who they guide through workouts and nutrition plans.

My Role

I was the founding designer leading the design and research for the coach side experience. I also covered needs for the customer facing app while I led hiring for the designer who would lead the customer facing experience. I led co-creation workshops as well as establishing the processes for design and research for the project.

The Team

The core product team consisted of the CEO and Founder who was also a Coaching Subject Matter Expert (SME) and the CTO. I also collaborated with other Coach Manager and Coaches/SMEs throughout the design process.

The Product

For one of the first projects I completed at Kickoff, I worked as the lead designer for the coach experience to redesign the workout scheduling automation feature, the Auto-Scheduler.

With access to a database of exercises, the Auto Scheduler (A-S) allowed coaches to create a workout plan complete with guided exercises in a matter of seconds what would normally take 15-30 minutes to plan and schedule.

Unfortunately, even with in depth guidance from coach managers, most coaches found it too confusing, opting for manually scheduling workouts in their client’s calendar which took much longer and limited their ability to scale their client base.

Duration

It took two months for me to brainstorm and design within the limitations of the existing architecture, then user test the new functionality and make adjustments based on those learnings. From start to finish the design and research process took 2 months. The designs were prioritized and rolled out in quick succession.

Design Process

Challenges

While communicating via text message with their clients was straight forward, scheduling weekly workouts (new design pictured in the center panel above) was unintuitive for the coaches and required in depth instruction from coach managers.

Technical Limitations

2 separate layers of alerts and security requirements led to consecutive user flows that agents had to resolve. In a typical user flow, agents must first submit APIS (free from spelling and empty field errors), which then may return an Agent Override Alert (additional flags on required information or documents). Once they address or override the alert, they may submit again governing body regulating travel to the desired international destination. Then the governing arm of the destination will return requests for security requirements if needed.

This resulted in two issues overall we needed to address in the final redesign:

First layer, how to present alerts that were categorized as Agent Overrides, like name mismatch, passport expired required, exit date required and prior to the first APIS submission.
Second layer, how to present Security Code requirements for agents to resolve.

User Experience

Lack of context particularly for new agents. In the legacy flow, agents were taken to a separate page. In the first redesign, they were taken to a modal. Both versions failed to give agents the context of where in the form the issues originated.

Lack of targeted guidance. In the error messages, Agents were not given enough information to make informed decisions such that overrides were being given to passengers who should not have been given the permission to travel. If they selected the link that would direct them to more information, they would find pages of content that was difficult to parse through when they were in a time crunch.

Agents felt they were caught in a loop. Due to multiple error and security layers, agents felt they were addressing issue after issue with no end in sight.

Project Budget & Timeline

There were budgeting and timeline concerns given that this was the third iteration. When I joined the team, the second redesign had been in development. It had been user tested, but for various reasons, the issues had not been addressed when it went into production, and those same issues arose in Beta as complaints from agents in the field. I needed to move quickly to redesign the features and address those issues not satisfactorily resolved by the previous teams.

Research

User Interviews · Observation · Co-Creation

User Interviews illustrate the concerns of the coaches, and help me empathize from the perspective of the users.
Observation brings awareness to problems that may not have been obvious.
Co-Creation brings consensus and prioritizes solutions that have the greatest impact to users.

USER INTERVIEWS

Interviewing and collaborating with subject matter experts, I was able to understand the components of putting together a workout and what is needed for scheduling workouts.

I categorized coach decision making into functional groups from high level decisions to minute decisions.

OBSERVATION

The existing Auto Scheduler was comprised of 3 steps or tabs. If a coach had it set up optimally (the set-up itself was more involved, requiring dedicated time), they would be able to simply review and select "Auto-Schedule" a weekly process requiring 3 clicks.

The 3 step Auto-scheduler optimized "Happy Path" that most coaches never set up.

Distinctions between, what needs to be “Automated” and what does not.

Coaches preferred being able to make minor adjustments to the schedule as they planned.
While automation can be a very effective time saver, certain actions did not take much time from coaches or only required review, like designating workouts and days.
The original A-S populated recommended stages (groups of workouts) without a way to explore further, and coaches felt the A-S was limiting.

Coaches were also confused by the many different kinds of controls.

CO-CREATION

I led co-creation brainstorm, idea grouping, and prioritization sessions with coaches that built on previous sessions with other coaches.

Different coaches had had different color post-its. Pink Post-it was the first group of 2 coaches where one coach took notes, and therefore had more ideas that subsequent groups built on.

One request we were not able to address in this project was longer term program planning for coaches who would like to create a macro plan of 6-8 weeks for their clients with progressions (increasing exercise difficulty).

Product Design Principles

(The How) - Defining Requirements

Surface Information
Reduce Complexity
Communicate Function
Integrate Flexibility

Inspiration

I referenced interaction patterns from analogous experiences like, Google Calendar, AirTable, Calendly and Asana. I also took inspiration from e-commerce shopping apps and entrepreneurial apps like Airbnb and tools like Figma.

Screenshots

AngelList

Google Calendar

Kanban

AngelList

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Wireframes

(The What) - Addressing pain points

Reduce time it takes to find and schedule workouts
Filter/narrow down workout and exercise choices from the Library based on Client needs and goals
Allow coaches to determine days of workouts

Low Fidelity

Wireframes 1

Wireframes 2

Wireframes 3

Wireframes 1

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Problems & Solutions

SURFACE INFORMATION

Problem. Coaches had difficulty understanding what "Stages" were, (they were series of workouts, which are composed of groups of exercises). It was also unclear what exercises the workouts contained.
There was also no way to browse the extensive library of workouts or see workouts that the coaches created themselves.

Solution. Get feedback from coaches about what information is important for them to make the decision to add the workout to their client’s program.
Introduce a search function that also surfaces coach created workouts.

In the workout card design explorations show whether it is a Stage (set of workouts) or a Workout (set of exercises) feature the workout and stage, what kind of workout (circuits or super sets), the difficulty level, the equipment required, the average client rating, and the number of that workout completed by the client as well as the last workout completed date.

We allowed coaches to preview the workouts in the Stage, or the exercises in the workout.

REDUCE COMPLEXITY

Problem. The user flows still allowed errors to occur which were unintuitive to fix (Coaches can designate the number of active workout days in a week, rest days or specific workouts on designated days. If any designated days are conflicting or the number of days/workouts selected are insufficient, it showed an error message).

Solution. Design avoidable errors out of the user flow.
Explore other methods to “designate” days. The idea that felt most intuitive to coaches was having controls for each exercise on each day of the week and “locking” the exercise to the day.

Rather than having two separate screens for scheduling and previewing, I combined the two functions into one screen.

COMMUNICATE FUNCTION

Problem. Most coaches actually did not understand that the A-S was repeating or copying forward the selected workouts for each client, and unless otherwise designated, randomly populating them each week.
Essentially saving and rotating workouts into the next week’s schedule.

Solution. We needed to make this function more obvious to coaches.
A similar feature would be a basket or cart in an e-commerce app, like a subscription grocery box.

Explorations of the selected workouts "cart" and the Workouts Search Filter used in usability testing with coaches.

INTEGRATE FLEXIBILITY

Problem. Coaches preferred being able to make minor adjustments to the schedule as they planned.

Solution. Give coaches the opportunity to alter or adjust the schedule at multiple points in the user flow.

In the final designs, coaches are able to add or delete workouts in both the Workouts and Plan Tabs/Steps of the user flow.

Usability Testing

All research, feedback, and mapping resulted in low fidelity wireframes which went through one round of feedback with coaches. Then I moved on to usability testing medium fidelity prototypes with 5 coaches who ranged from new and tenured Kickoff coaches who were active users of the A-S or not using it at all.

Surface Information

SURFACE INFORMATION

Feedback from coaches. Coaches loved the ability to see more information about the stages and preview the exercises in the workouts. They only needed to see the total number of workouts completed, and the date of the last completion.

Feedback from devs. While we can display the preview of the workouts and exercises easily, adding the functionality of editing the workout at this point, because of the way the previous A-S was implemented, would require significantly more development time.

Communicate Function

Feedback from coaches. Both the icon with a number and the “Selected Workouts” button were confusing. “Workouts in Rotation” was a lot more intuitive.

Feedback from devs. We can make the “Workouts in Rotation” the landing page rather than a secondary page.

Handoff

Feedback from PM and Devs. We need to phase the roll-out of new features. What are the features we can prioritize?

Solution. For phase 1, we could include the new workout and stage cards with the exercise preview, and the new filter design within the existing tab flow.

Prioritize Surfacing Information

I integrated the new workout cards with previews into the existing architecture of the auto-scheduling feature in preparation for handoff.

Responsive Design

While most coaches planned workouts for their clients on Desktop, the application is web responsive so I also kept mobile interaction in mind throughout the process.

Stagger Deployment

Ultimately, throughout the process of research and testing, I was able to identify multiple product areas to improve. We had enough ideas for 3 quarters but needed to reduce the scope to the current quarter.