No Way I’ve Been Waiting THIS Long
Have you ever waited a long time to use a piece of equipment during peak hours at the gym? Have you ever had to disrupt your plans because a machine was occupied for an extended period of time? As four people who love to work out, we have found this very headache while working out. There’s been times where we’ve had to wait close to THIRTY MINUTES for a machine to finally open up. Even good music can’t make the wait go by faster. This is a crisis that all college students who wish to take advantage of their outrageous tuition by utilizing their schools’ gyms face. To get a deeper understanding of the pain points of these students, we traveled to NYU’s 404 and Palladium gyms to conduct in-depth interviews with college fitness enthusiasts. Most of our interviewees told us that during peak times at the gym, especially between 3pm and 5pm and on weekends, they too have waited long periods of time, often more than fifteen minutes, in line to use a piece of equipment. Most of our interviewees told us that they would always have their original fitness plans disrupted by this waiting in queues. One interviewee even told us that he had even suffered a muscle strain because of the long wait after warming up and had to get physical therapy to fix it. Needless to say, queuing on the use of equipment is a struggle for many college students trying to work out on a budget.
Word Vomit to Control?
To truly understand how we can fix this problem students face at the gym, we needed to get into the minds of them and see it from their point of view. We utilized Design Thinking in our approach, and wrote on a bunch of sticky notes reasons why people even go to the gym in the first place. By doing this, this allowed us to know exactly WHY waiting is such an inconvenience. What started as word vomit eventually turned into us realizing what the real issue was: people go to the gym to feel a sense of control, but by making them wait several minutes for a machine, that sense of control gets taken away from them; this then defeats the whole point of them going to the gym. All of a sudden, our purpose became clear: we needed to help people feel a sense of control when going to the gym. After we understood our purpose, it became clear from our interviews what it felt like to others when control was taken away from them. We noticed that people not only felt their control was taken away when they had to wait for the machine, but also when they felt the pressure of people impatiently waiting for them to get off the machine. Control was taken when they also felt forced to socialize with others while waiting and their routines got changed. After understanding our consumers’ needs, it became clear what our solution was going to be. We needed to design something that would solve the wait time issue at the gym, while making users feel like they are still in control of their gym experience.
Our Groundbreaking Solution
In order to attack this problem our team had to look for a solution that was both easy to implement while also being extremely effective. Since we were targeting college students and gyms we decided that an app would be the best possible platform for a solution to this problem. This is how we landed on Violet GymSync, the app linked to the gym and all of its machines in order to give the members more control and steadiness to their daily gym routine. The main feature of our app is the virtual waiting line, which can be reserved ahead of time to guarantee a spot and a time range for when the machine will be available. By implementing this into the school gyms, college students would be able to choose ahead of time which machines they are going to use so they can plan the rest of their workout accordingly. The other feature of our app is the work-in feature, which allows people to request to work-in on a machine through the app, once again saving time and social awkwardness. Now, in order for all of this to be effective and actually guarantee its success, we are going to implement a qr code feature that everyone will scan as they walk in. This will not only ensure that everyone is on the platform, but it will also keep track of how many people are in the gym so that students can see how busy the gym is at certain times. Overall, Violet GymSync will bring back control and efficiency to students' workouts so they don’t lose their passion nor ability to workout at college.
Learning from “Failures”
Throughout this month-long process, there were many moments where things didn’t turn out as we expected. It was from these moments, however, that we were able to learn more about design thinking. As we started our interviews, we thought of a certain set of answers we wanted to hear. With our main problem in mind, we wanted to hear that people had to wait a long time for machines and that this was a major problem for them. At first, we viewed any interview that went against our expected answers a failure, but by using the 5 Whys, we were soon able to turn these “failures” into insightful interviews. By asking why after every answer, we were able to get more information from our interviews and further understand the users of our product. We learned that some people didn’t mind the long wait times on machines because they would just use a different machine or do an alternative workout. To them, it was the ability to control their workouts, and get in and out of the gym when they wanted to that made them feel better about crowded gyms. It was here where we really learned what design thinking was about, empathy. Asking why and empathizing with our users allowed us to get to the root of the problem and design a solution truly centered around the user. If we stuck to our rigid thinking, we would’ve hit a roadblock, influenced by our biases. But by simply asking “why,” we were able to learn all sorts of things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise.
