Client
Life Time considers itself a “Healthy Way of Life” company that encompasses fitness, lifestyle, and entertainment offerings for its members.
The organization opened its first club in Eagan Minnesota in 1994 and today has 139 locations across nearly 40 markets nationwide.
Opportunity
Life Time was seeking a better understanding of how the flow of the online joining experience, or online membership sales, could be improved for speed, clarity, and usability.
Life Time was looking to combine the quantitative data that they had about platforms used, common page paths, and where drop-offs occurred with usability testing findings in order to further optimize and support users through the online enrollment process.
Process
research
I put on my prospective gym member hat and dove into the Life Time website looking to join. Joining online was harder than I anticipated! It was after several uneventful attempts at clicking “join” in the upper left corner that I began to scan the page for alternative words or links to start the process. This is how my understanding of a potentially frustrated consumer’s mindset when way-finding and language are unclear began.
Usability Review & Test Planning
I performed a heuristics analysis on a list of steps a user would want to accomplish on the website to identify issues that were in violation of Bruce Tognazzin’s First Principles of Interaction Design. My findings from this usability review, combined with the findings from my three design teammates, helped us come together as a whole and define the tasks and goals that we would want to address in writing scenarios and constructing scripts for remote and in-lab user testing
Usability testing
The design team conducted a total of 12 usability tests. Test sessions were 20 minutes and each covered the same set of tasks to be carried out in identical scenarios.
8 remote tests were carried out individually by members of the design team. These test sessions were recorded with audio and video.
4 tests were conducted in-lab with members on my design team taking turns at the team having a turn in the following roles: person moderating, one person in the lab taking notes and two designers observing from a separate room.
Goals for Usability Testing
Gain insights into wayfinding and language obstacles during membership registration
Gain insight into user expectations and considerations when obtaining a membership online
Learn more about how users feel during the online process
Data Synthesis and Findings
To help us make sense out of the mountain of information collected from our interviews, the design team utilized trello to help us sift through and organize the data. The heuristic violation of Consistency that was identified as severe in my initial analysis, was experienced in the navigation tasks we had all 12 participants perform. It was primarily found in tasks involving enrollment page scrolling and completing steps 1-5. This supported my heuristic finding as well as corresponded with Life Time’s documentation of where the majority of their users were dropping off.
Findings and Design Recommendations
Primary Recommendations
With insights gathered from usability testing, I recommended moving forward with the following:
Simplify the requested user information on Member Info page
Provide explanation on offers and improve value transparency on Build Membership page
Make filters more visible and differentiate from other call to action buttons
Redesign the navigation layout to build users’ confidence in search results
Improve the ability to search for member’s appropriate location
The Design Team and My Role
I was one of four UX designer on the Life Time team. I completed an independent heuristic analysis to familiarize myself with the website and to assess potential problems. I conducted 2 remote test sessions with out of state participants, and as part of the group testing sessions, I performed as moderator, observer and notetaker. My insights, recommendations report and prototype were formed independently.