The Challenge
Three Stakeholders, One Broken App
Erialsoft’s fitness app was losing users fast. The product had confusing navigation, limited exercise variety, and a dated interface that frustrated people almost immediately. Making things harder: the company was run by three family members — Dan, Sarah, and Cyndi — each with a very different vision for what the app should become.
I was brought in to lead the UX redesign from the ground up — aligning three conflicting stakeholder perspectives, uncovering what users actually needed, and delivering a product that could compete in an oversaturated fitness market.
Key Insight
People Quit Within Minutes of Opening It
I ran surveys (200 sent, 41 back), six in-depth interviews, and watched people work out at local gyms. The pattern that jumped out was speed: users gave up on the app within the first few minutes, well before they reached the content that might have kept them.
The app wasn’t short on content; it was hiding the content it had. Exercises, progress, and support all lived a few taps too deep, and new users churned before they ever surfaced any of it. That reframed the brief from “what should we add” to “what can we get out of the way.”
Competitive Analysis
Competitors Ignored Beginners and Education
I led a competitive analysis across five major fitness apps, mapping their strengths and weaknesses. A pattern emerged: every competitor optimized for experienced users. None invested in onboarding for beginners, and none used educational content to build user confidence.
That opened two clear opportunities — a difficulty system that met users at their level, and an educational layer (instructional videos, form guidance) that no competitor offered.
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Field Research
Social Integration Was the Top Unmet Desire
Field research at gyms and persona development kept pointing to the same thing: fitness is social, but fitness apps are solitary. Users wanted to share progress, challenge friends, and feel part of a community. I built four personas around different fitness motivations — from time-pressed professionals to social gym-goers — and every single one prioritized connection.
That moved social from a nice-to-have to a core pillar of the redesign, and it shaped most of the decisions that came after.
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Design Evolution
From Research to Reality
I ran cross-functional workshops (Crazy 8’s and the like) to get the whole team designing, then narrowed everything to three principles the product had to live by: discoverable, progressive, social. Those became the filter for every later decision.
I focused wireframing on the two flows that were bleeding users, onboarding and exercise discovery, and cut registration to three steps. The real debate was how far to simplify; I argued for stripping onboarding to the bone and letting the app earn complexity later, and the testing backed that call.
Each prototype round went through guerrilla testing and a round of A/B tests on navigation and hierarchy. The lo-fi work leaned hard on accessibility and proper form guidance, carrying through the educational angle the competitive analysis had surfaced.
The Solution
A Fitness App That Meets Users Where They Are
The final design introduced three key innovations driven directly by research:
Progressive Difficulty System — Users select their fitness level (Beginner through Expert) during onboarding, and the app adapts content, language, and exercise complexity accordingly. This directly addressed the competitive gap around beginner accessibility.
Customizable Focus Areas — A “Focus” feature lets users prioritize training goals (muscle gain, cardio, flexibility), creating personalized experiences that keep users engaged beyond the initial novelty period.
Findable in Seconds — Auto-complete search, a flattened navigation, and visual exercise guides replaced the buried layout, so people reached what they wanted in seconds rather than minutes of digging.
From Redesign to Acquisition
improvement in user satisfaction with layout and feel
improvement in navigation effectiveness
increase in user happiness with exercise options
increase in signup rate
improvement in retention over 150 days
The MVP launched to a strong reception and kept evolving over the next six months, mostly deepening the social features and focus-area system. The three stakeholders who had disagreed on every detail finally aligned once research, not opinion, was setting the direction.
Erialsoft was later acquired by a larger competitor. I won’t claim the redesign closed that deal, but it put the product in materially better shape going into it — and seeing the work outlast the company is its own kind of result.
Reflection
What I Learned
On stakeholder alignment: The biggest design challenge wasn’t the interface — it was getting three people with completely different visions on the same page. Running structured workshops with clear frameworks (personas, competitive data) gave the conversations an objective foundation that personal opinions couldn’t provide.
On research scope: With 41 survey responses from 200 sent, the quantitative sample was limited. If I were to do this again, I’d invest more in recruiting to hit statistical significance, and I’d introduce analytics instrumentation earlier to supplement self-reported data with behavioral evidence.
On adapting to the user: The difficulty-level system was the right call, but we could have pushed further — adapting not just the content but the entire interface based on how experienced someone was. That’s where I’d take the next iteration.