Design a high tech gym.

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Design a high tech gym.

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Alan · Answer 1 · 2020-04-14T21:08:44+0000

1. Clarifying the question:

Is this a gym targetted for commercial gyms (24, LA Fitness, Equinox) or for companies (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn)?
- Commercial Gyms
What is the company's target and metrics?
- Increase user engagement and user acuqisition to attract and retain more customers
Are we looking at a specific demographic age and region or do you want me to define it?
- Define it

2. Provide Customer Segments and Assume USA Region.

Ages 6-18 - Younger kids and students must attend the gym with their parent guardians (swimming, work out, sauna)
Ages 19 - 65 - Younger adults and especially this generation now a days want to be healthy, fit, and look good
Ages 65 - 80+ (Assume on average 80 life expectancy) - Elders attend the gym to stay active

3. I would like to prioritize focusing this high tech gym for the younger generation/millenials (19 - 65) because

They are Tech Savvy
Based on attending the gym, majority of the customers are ages 19 - 65
Kids ages 6 - 18 can go to the gym with their parents in the age 19 - 65 bucket, so we can include both markets
We can talk about creating new high tech equipment for elders after prioritizing ages 19 - 65 group

4. Goal: Creating a high tech gym for commercial gyms for ages 19 - 65 group in the US and focus on attracting and retaining customers.

5. A few pain points for these customers attending the gym

Rush Hour
- Gym is normally very busy after school and work (3pm - 8pm) and customers get discouraged
Not enough equipment
- Customers have to wait to use the equipment, which will waste time and ruin routine
Dirty
- Equipment and floor is filthy and no one cleans

6. I would like to prioritize #2 because #1 can be a short term fix once we focus on #2 to make the equipments optimal. #3 is a short term fix by hiring additional resources to clean the premises and equipment or implement an irobot cleaner.

7. To create a High Tech gym I am thinking of a few solutions that can improve the overall efficiency of gym equipments

Create one machine per muscle group (Example: Chest group (Incline, Flat, and Decline) or Shoulders, Back, Biceps/Triceps)
- Algorithim Coded - No physical weights, but you can press the screen to choose how much weight you want, so this does not waste time when changing weights and/or working with a partner.
- Music to connect to earphones
- Speeds up the process for each individual and this may reduce rush hour times as well
- Efficient process and decreases wait times and routines
- Increases the get in and get out mentality
- Creates better work out routines
If we have more time and resources/budget for the long term solution, I'm thinking of creating the same machine mentioned above, but for all muscle group. I'm visioning 100 idividual machines with a time limit of 1 hour that allows you to workout any parts of the body.

8. Metrics

Customer feedback
Retention rate of the gym
DAU and MAU of the gym and machine
Gym sign ups/referrals

9. Conclusion: To design a high tech gym in the US for commercial gym purposes, I would build X # of machine for individual use that can focus on all muscle groups. This can create a better workout routine, reduce time at the gym, reduce wait times and rush hours, and a new way to work out opposed to a traditional add or reduce weight machines per workout.

Joanna Chavez · Answer 2 · 2022-01-15T16:16:25+0000

Overall structure I follow for product design questions.

Ask clarifying questions.
Re-state the revised goal based on answers to clarifying questions.
Build high level user personas and use cases.
Go through a typical user journey.
Discuss pain points and challenges.
Identify and prioritize high level solutions and drill down on innovative features.
Propose MVP with future iterations.
Identify metrics to determine product success.

Clarifying Questions.

1. Will this gymnasium be located within a high-end home, public gymnasium, school or place of work?

Ans: public gymnasium

2. Will this gymnasium cater to a specific type of purpose (i.e. crossfit, sport, jiu jitsu, etc.) or will this be a traditional multi-purpose gym?

Ans: multi-purpose gym

3. Will this gym target a specific gender (i.e. a gym catering to only women) or to a specific age range (i.e. the elderly)?

Ans: women of all age ranges

4. For the scope of this interview, are we specifically talking about women achieving their health fitness goals or are we catering to a more specific health goal (i.e. losing weight or building strength or self-defense, or all of these)?

Ans: all of their health fitness goals

Re-stating the goal.

The goal is to design a high-tech, public and multi-purpose gymnasium targeted to only women of all age ranges who want to meet their health fitness goals.

User Personas and Use Cases.

"The Lone Ranger". A woman who has health fitness goals and goes to the gym on her own. She typically puts on her headphones and gets through her workout without much interaction with those around her in the gym and just needs to get the workout done. Her primary need is to have quick access to equipment and a good soundtrack that keeps her motivated.

"The Social Butterfly." A woman who has health fitness goals, but wants to go to the gym and get through her workout as part of her social routine. Her primary need is to have access to group classes and the ability to even enjoy friendly interactions and competition with those around her.

"The Competitive Athlete." This is a woman who is on a competitive sports team, preparing for a body building comp, or training to run a marathon (this woman is super awesome). Her primary need is access to 1-1 training and an efficient way to know her overall progress, health and performance throughout a workout and over time.

Challenges and Pain Points.

As Alan mentioned, quick access to equipment especially during times of high volume.
Especially true for newbie Lone Rangers and Social Butterflies, lack of knowledge around which workouts to do or what equipment to use for an optimal workout.
Knowing how to properly use the equipment.
Additionally, lack of understanding around whether progress is being made or whether gym-goer is on track towards her/their fitness goals.
Knowing when one is training too hard or is likely to injure themselves.
Easy way to know and schedule group classes.
Access to cost-effective training sessions with 1-1 time with fitness experts.
High-touch interactions with equipment that cause germs to spread easily.

High Level Solutions and Features.

Smart Equipment. Workout equipment that allows you to keep track of your workout history, make workout suggestions (i.e. # of reps, etc.), and is able to help guide you when needed. For example,
- Via a mobile app a user can create a secure account (with RBAC and authentication capability)
- User can enter in details such as age, height, weight and enter in health fitness goal(s)
- App connects data to all gym equipment and equipment relays workout details back to app for post workout tracking and planning
- you can log onto equipment via biometric data (i.e. face recognition) for single sign-on
- Once signed into a machine, the machine will set weight level and other controls automatically (i.e. for bench press this can set lbs and for treadmill this could be incline, speed, and time)
- These automatic levels are set based on details entered into the app (i.e. weight and fitness targets)
- The levels can be overriden by manual intervention if needed
- Equipment allows you to engage in friendly competition with others who have signed into the app and that you have "friended".
- AR/VR also allows you to workout in remote and exotic places of your choosing :-)
Interactive Workout Monitoring.
- Gym is able to sell clothing with sensors that allow you to keep track of the right form.
- Your position and body form during specific workouts (i.e. for running on a treadmill your core and foot form) then gets logged back to the mobile app for tracking and performance improvement
- Additionally, an intelligent engine can use this data to make suggestions in real time during a workout (i.e. alert runner on treadmill of poor foot form to prevent injury)
Gym Recommendation and Optimization Engine.
- log in daily target goals in the app (i.e. you want to target legs vs biceps/back)
- app uses this information to recommend specific machines and can alert gym goers when machines become available (presumably this requires gym goers to log out with the same mechanism they used to log into machine)
- App can also use this collectively to determine when there is too much overlap in target goals (i.e. everyone wantst to target legs today). This information can be relayed back to some gym goers as a warning so they can plan accordingly.
- The app can also use this information to suggest optimal times to optimize attendance at the gym.

Solution	Impact	Effort
Smart Equipment	High	Medium
Monitoring	Medium	High
Gym R&O Engine	Low	Medium

Proposed MVP.

Creating a multi purpose gym just for women that requires usage of an app that would allow user inputs to optimize gym volume and recommend machines to reduce likelihood of "unavailable" machines. This has high impact and would require building an app and a recommendation algorithm which would be relatively low effort.

Future Iterations.

Introduct Smart Equipment. Partner with vendors to introduct smart equipment. The impact is high and would be relatively medium to high effort.

Intelligent Monitoring. This is a high impact and high effort feature which is why this is prioritized lastly. A moonshot feature that would require partnering with clothing brands and tech companies for introducing sensors. Algorithms would need to be created to take sensor data and recommend fitness best practices.

Success Metrics.

1. No. of gym memberships

2. Average lifetime of gym membership (i.e. monitor drop off rates or one month subscriptions)

3. Revenue over time

Sanchit Gupta · Answer 3 · 2020-04-30T07:23:48+0000

Clarify:

In person gym or virtual like Peloton? (in person)
Any constaints? (No)
Can I assume US (Yes)

User: A high-tech gym will attract people into technology, and more well off since it's likely more expensive. Additionally, these are probably more likely goingt to be found in denser technologically more advanced areas like SF, NY, LA, Seattle, etc.

Young working adults with good paying jobs
Families where the parents want an efficient workout
Families with parents and kids can both workout/ stay busy

I'm going to focus on user group 1 because I believe that this group will be the largest user segment.

Pain points in existing gym usage:

Hard to track workout/progress
Signing into the gym isn't always super quick
Really hard to know how crowded it is
Can't know if my gym buddies are at the gym without manual communication
Hard to remember what classes are going on right now

I think we can solve multiple of these, but I'm going to prioritize the pain points based on how big of a pain point they are. This is something in real life I would be doing a lot of user interviews and surveys to gather what I think is the actual biggest pain point.

3, 4, 1, 5, 2. I essentially in my head did a matrix with (number of users who have this problem, magnitude of problem, any existing solutions that make this better) to determine this order.

Goal/product vision: Help young working adults who are into tech understand the crowd at the gym without having to be at the gym

Solutions:

A camera that's at the gym that people can see from their mobile app, similar to nest. Can double as a security camera.
1. This is really creepy and probably has privacy/ security issues
Show the number of people at the gym on a mobile app by having people sign out when they're gone from the gym too.
1. Allow people to become friends and allow them to see other's gym presence
2. I can even imagine a push notification
  1. "Daniel is at the gym" or maybe more anonymized like "1 of your friends is at the gym"
Have weight sensors to understand the number of people at the gym approximately
1. Can maybe be pretty accurate because it can know when 80-400 lbs change, that probably means a person. Has to be careful with this as a gym is a very heavy place already so this is probably not worthwhile.
Fingerprint to use any machine/ go in/out of any door. This gives mobile app people the ability to see who's at which machine, reserve a machine, see how many people playing basketball, etc.
1. This is really really annoying for the end user.
2. Allow people to become friends and allow them to see other's gym presence
Have users sign in from their phone in the gym, track their location inside the gym, give mobile app users the ability to see heatmaps of where people are at the gym from their mobile phone
1. People can maybe use each other's phones to get into the gym. We can maybe prevent this by FaceID verification to be able to enter the gym with your phone. Unique phone key, etc.
2. Would heavily test this because I can imagine some people may not want to be tracked, even if it's just at the gym. I don't think this will be a big issue personally, becuase of the benefit you get as a user.
3. Allow people to become friends and allow them to see other's gym presence

Going back to the goal/product vision, I would build option 5 since I think it does it the best, but I'd be careful of number of people who sneak into the gym. I also think, it feels the most high tech and makes users feel like the gym is advanced and it's a good feeling for people who are into tech to have.

Success Metrics:

Revenue
Number of mobile app installs/ number of active users (or subscribed users)
DAU/ WAU/MAU
# of sessions/ gym visits per user
# of people sneaking into the gym due to entry method
- Measured by # of people that were caught (probably very underreported)
# of active friends added
Push notification
# of users who request to opt out of being tracked at the gym

Recap

I would focus on solving the problem of not knowing how crowded the gym is/ who I know is there. To do so, I would track people's locations when they're geo-fenced inside the gym. I would then show this info as a # + heatmap to end users (anonymizing who's there) so that they can see who is there and where they're at (if I care about basketball only, I don't care how crowded the pool is for example). I will also allow friends to mutually add each other which gives them the consent to know when one another is at the gym, with the ability to take that privilege about yourself away from anyone.