Video Workouts

Role

Design Owner

Teammates

Project Manager

Fitness Scientist SME

Club Liaison

Leadership

Timeline

August - December 2021

Outcome

Shipped to over 20,000 fitness clubs

What are video workouts?

Video workouts are pre-recorded exercises programmed specifically to a machine and cater to different fitness levels, goals, and preferences, offering a wide range of exercise styles, durations, and intensities.

Precor machines have previously tried video workouts like RunTV, but nothing proprietary.

So, we planned on partnering with studios to produce our own video workout content.

Where can we fit the new video workout content in the new NextGen OS?

Navigating video workouts should be simple and content categorization should minimize cognitive load.

How can we also make video workouts uniquely interactive to keep the user engaged throughout the workout?

Ideation

After my PM and I prioritized each problem, we iterated on low-fidelity designs for a couple of design sprints and pitched to Engineering to understand feasibility. We decided on the following:

Hierachy

Video workouts should have its own category in the NextGen OS options for workouts.

Using a similar content curation approach to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, we will offer out-of-the-box video workout subcategories that are personalized to the exerciser.

  • Promotional/seasonal categories.

  • With an option for the exerciser to create their own categories down the road

Messaging

Display friendly messages and prompts to the users reminding them to drink water, check heart rate, etc. This will be timed with every workout.

  • Messaging will be limited at first - will appear in regular intervals and at the beginning/ending of each phase of the workout.

  • With an option for Precor or the content studios to timestamp certain parts of a video workout to display a custom message down the road.

Research

It was best to widen our range of testers, in age, fitness background, lifestyle, etc. when testing conceptual projects like Video Workouts. We gathered a pool of volunteers and walked them through low-fidelity design specs.

Can users navigate to the video workouts they want?

Does the user interface and information hierarchy reduce the cognitive load?

Yes, all users were able to navigate to the specific workouts we asked them to.

The information displayed on the workout cards and on the takeover screens gave them enough context before starting/committing to the workout.

Will curating video workouts into personalized categories increase engagement?

Yes, curating personalized workout categories was well-received and is unique to the fitness space (we validated this with competitor analysis).

How do users behave/interact with video content when exercising today?

Is there a lack of engagement?

What are the causes of that?

Yes, there is a lack of engagement for users during workouts… but this is caused because most exercisers would rather stream other media like Netflix, Spotify, or news even during video workouts because:

  • Exercisers want to be distracted or achieve mental relaxation from the physical intensity of the workout e.g. through Netflix or similar content

  • Exercisers want to be motivated e.g. through music

  • Exercisers want to be efficient with time and multi-task e.g. through audiobooks

Will custom messaging increase that engagement and be a supplementary benefit to workout sessions?

We also learned that custom messaging is a nice-to-have feature, but user reception was fairly weak for this feature.

Action items

After sharing these insights with leadership and weighing the feasibility feedback from Engineering, my PM and I prioritized the features as such:

(P0)

Create a Video Workouts category and subcategories in the NextGen OS

(P1)

Create or leverage an existing component for mid-workout messaging

After prioritizing design work, I iterated on designs for both P0 and P1.

I shared my work regularly during design crits with the larger Precor design team.

I cannot disclose design comps because specifics are still under an NDA.

Reflection

One of the more unique aspects of this project was it was more conceptual and had a larger scope than other work I did at Peloton.

Due to my limited bandwidth (as I was also working on other, high-priority projects) and limitations in research (covid-19, smaller pool of available applicants), I was forced to be more scrappy with my UX Research.

However, we were able to invalidate our assumptions on the need for increased engagement and messaging… test our designs’ information architecture and navigation element, and move on to road mapping and iterating on designs.