Olympus

My Role

Product Designer - UX Research, Visual Design, User Flows, Prototyping, User Testing

Team

Scott Tsangeos - CEO & PM

Gautam Visveswaran - CTO

Daisy Chang - SWE

Bruno Damiati - SWE

Matheus Lopes - SWE

Timeline

10 months, Dec 2023 - Sep 2024

Background

Olympus is a Northwestern backed Startup launched with the goal of revolutionizing the way gym users optimize their interactions inside and outside the gym and make connections.
‍
After I joined, it transitioned into a specialized SaaS product made to help athletes and coaches plan, perform, and evaluate their team workouts at school and college gyms. I was brought on to revamp Olympus while transitioning to a new offering to make it ready for client and venture cap pitches.
‍
I designed the product MVP and further refined it into a complete solution by differentiating from competition to help the team secure $1M in funding and sign big schools and colleges as customers. I played a pivotal role in crafting the features that makes Olympus novel and unique.

THE PROBLEM

Lots of unmet needs and negative feedback but which problem to solve?

Glaring issues that made funding hard to come by

I was presented with a set of critical challenges that were hindering the product’s ability to attract angel investors and secure customers.

It was made clear to the team that no further discussions would occur unless the app demonstrated a professional look and effectively differentiated itself from the competition.

Clunky and confusing by design.

Lots of issues due to poor ux and visual design. Features were not well thought out and partially developed.

Not serving all key users.

The app solution was more focussed on solving needs of athletes while the coaches were completely left out.

Not positioned well enough.

There are a lot of apps that help eliminate pen an paper at the gym - how is it different from the competition?

THE CHALLENGE

Take a partially built product with low usability and upgrade it to a highly interactive, desirable and differentiated solution that completely addresses the needs of both athletes and coaches at school, colleges and gyms.

High Level Design Strategy

Olympus was evolving rapidly and that needed serious planning for the roadmap ahead. I played a key role in strategizing the way forward to make it launch ready.

1.1

Timeline for Strategy Implementation

A thorough UX Audit...

In order to rebuild the app from a fresh perspective, it was necessary to first understand the underlying issues in the existing designs.

1.2
Examples of Old Designs

And here's what I found

Inconsistent Visual Hierarchy

Lacked clear differentiation between key elements, leading to user confusion.

Poor Accessibility Compliance

The color scheme and contrast didn't meet accessibility standards, hindering usability.

Inconsistent Styling

Lack of a proper style guide to maintain brand identity across different elements and screens cause disorientation

Cognitive Overload

Dense information presentation overwhelmed users and complicated task completion.

Inefficient User Flow

The layout required too many clicks to access features often causing confusion - reducing usability.

Setting design pillars for success

Working as efficiently as possible and delivering consistently. I prioritized rapid iteration, testing and developing to achieve results fast

Visually remarkable

Communicated simply and precisely. Packaged in a tech-forward design language.

Intentional and Intuitive

Designed thoughtfully to mimic human interactions inside and outside the gym.

Adapts seamlessly

Crafted purposely for multiple end users in mind with different goals - both athletes and coaches.

VISUAL DESIGN

Addressing first things first

Bold, Striking & Techy Design System

To initiate the redesign, I first established a comprehensive style guide and design system to ensure consistency across the app.

Strategically, I opted for a bold and modern aesthetic, selecting a striking yellow on dark navy blue. This combination not only gave the app a tech-forward feel but also provided strong contrast ratios for enhanced accessibility and visual impact.

2.1

Building blocks for new Design System

Complex components made simple

Working closely with Software Developers, I made sure the designs are consistent with the actual development of each individual component - by making detailed specifications

2.2

Guidelines for Workout Card component

UXR : ATHLETE

Understanding athlete behavior inside and outside gyms

Mapping a school/college athlete's gym routine

In order to design a platform for college athletes that enhances the gym experience, it's necessary to analyze their frustrations with every macro/micro interaction.

3.1

Athlete's gym routine - a journey map

Pain points

Printout distribution, taking pictures, and filling sheets - are all wasteful and add complexity.

Writing or typing how much you lift for every rep, for every set is cumbersome.

Keeping track of your progress over time can get harder and harder as time goes with paper-notes.

Opportunities

Browsing the internet for videos of the correct form can be made more seamless and simple.

Socializing with friends and communicating with coaches have a huge impact on athletes' workouts.

I'm seeing a pattern here...
Plan -> Perform -> Evaluate -> Repeat

If we carefully try to understand the user motivations at each stage of the journey every week, it broadly corresponds to 3 main goals as shown in Fig 3.2

3.2

Thematic approach to designing solution

ATHLETE EXPERIENCE

Core flows of the mobile app for athletes

Create executable workout templates at home

Plan

Human behavior to carry their phone to the gym makes it an obvious choice to prepare a workout plan on.

We made it easy to convert a workout template sent by the coach into a template before coming to the gym which can be executed directly without referring to notes.

Further, these templates can directly be prepared by coaches too for athletes and sent in bulk instead of providing blank template sheets to the athlete.

4.1

Create workout templates

4.2

Link videos for reference

4.3

Save and share

Make workouts a breeze

Perform

Whether its starting a new or a templated workout, easily mark sets as done and switch between different exercises like you are flipping through your notes to mark your progress.

4.4

Marking sets and reps as complete

4.5

Swipe exercise interaction

Share -> Discover -> Get inspired

Evaluate

Majority of the conversations that happen at the gym between athletes is to find out how much they lift and their workout routine.

Never has there been a better way to share your precise workout in your gym circle to inspire while also knowing what people are doing differently,

4.6

Posting a workout

4.7

Starting someone else's workout

Track your growth in detail

Evaluate

Having a dedicated application for school/college workouts provides the athletes with a single source of truth for tracking their numbers.

This gave us a convenient opportunity to capitalize on that to provide detailed workout analytics to track their performance over-time not just for athletes but also for their coaches for evaluation.

4.8

Analyzing specific exercises and muscles

Keeping it lean with low-cost user testing

We tested our key user flows on lite testing versions to speed up experimentation. I rapidly iterated to improve task success rates and time scores. Once validated, our dev team built it out.

95% overwhelmingly positive feedback

Overall it was a huge level up from the existing app experience and users saw that.

150% increase in task success rates

The color scheme and contrast didn't meet accessibility standards, hindering usability.

60% reduction in task completion time

Clear visual cues and intuitive flow made completing user tasks way more efficient.

Tedious typing during workouts

Entering set and rep values every time was unnecessary. I introduced exercise history within workout cards to choose between previously exercise version histories.

4.9

Version histories - Recognition Over Recall

UXR : COACH

Conception of a new offering

Revisiting athlete's routing to discover coaching behavior patterns

As I was designing the athlete experience, our research showed a huge gap in the interactions between the athlete and the coach. Athlete’s performance evaluation and workout planning was both dependent heavily on the coach.

Hence it was clear to us that in order to address the entire journey of an athlete-coach experience we had to understand coaches’ behavior and address their needs.

5.1

Coach's role in planning and evaluation

Pain points

Coaches spend several hours on making and updating Excel sheets which are hard to manage.

Lack of data visualization on Excel sheets make performance tracking and evaluations inconvenient.

Opportunities

Coaches sighted an interest in maintaining a calendar of their workout sessions with athletes.

Communications over email and can be hard to keep up with when large team are involved.

5.2

Exercise workout template and performance sheet

COACH EXPERIENCE

A web platform - crafted with purpose for coaches

Import athlete workout data with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

In order to create a performance visualizing tool, we needed to create the athlete exercise database first.

Coaches are used to collecting athletes' workout sheets to keep track of their performance. Keeping in mind the needs of coaches and the adoption period for a new tool, we created a way to update the athlete database with images of athlete workout sheets.

6.1

Converting images to workout data

Track fitness and performance of teams and individual athletes

Having a dedicated data base of all exercises and athletes allows you to create the teams you coach.

Having a central platform to log in all exercises helps create visual graphs and track performance metrics.

6.2

Performance tracking and teams

Invite athletes to join private organization teams

Adding athletes to teams in bulk is easy with sharing team codes and links. Personal invitations are also possible from coaches with athlete's email.

6.3

Invite and join teams

Team scheduling and communication simplified

Coaches can treat Olympus as a source of truth for their schedules and conversation histories with their athletes and other coaches in the organization.

Coaches have dedicated teams, and athletes can create groups to simplify their calendar syncing and messaging across team members and friends.

Take conversations outside the gym for continuous growth. Coaches stay updated on athlete's condition and provide personal attention.

6.4

Calendar and Messaging

REFLECTION

Taking ownership and making a difference

Measuring my impact

I'm very grateful to have been a part of a small team where I could actively contribute to the vision and mission of Olympus.

Raised 1M USD across multiple investors

Not only did I help in building the MVP and new product offerings but also helped create pitches and demo flows.

Added 21 new organizations with long term plans

Some big names like University of Georgia, Purdue University, University of South Dakota, Northwestern University signed long term contracts with us.

Increased users by 24x (from 200-5000)

When I joined, we started with only 200 users from Northwestern University, but soon had athletes from all across the United States colleges and schools.

Key learnings

I was really able to level-up as a designer at Olympus as a one-man-team, being involved at every touchpoint of design.

Becoming a systems's thinker, not just a UX specialist

Not only making screens visually appealing but also carefully planning how the whole ecosystem of product offerings come together at a systems level.

Constraints can make you come up with efficient solutions

Initially, we had low dev support which required me to be cognizant of that fact and implement designs in versions, slowly becoming more interactive with each iteration.

Talking the language of Devs -handoff with efficiency

Collaborating closely with software developers has taught me the importance of clear, detailed design handoffs to ensure seamless implementation.