app redesign
Highlights
- Redesign of Strands Fitness
- Design of Strands Fitness Pro for iPhone
Strands Fitness: Before & After
Recently the newly anointed Strands Fitness team was instructed to simplify and clarify a product that was chock full of good features, but sinking under its own weight – at least visually. User experience had been an afterthought and the UI was tired, washed out, and bloated. Strands Fitness needed a diet.
My job was to drive the creative side of the team to solve the biggest user experience and interface problems with our site and mobile app and to get things done “yesterday”. I turned around a new built look and feel for both web and mobile apps within a few weeks.
Here is a look at the results.
Web app
One of our first tasks was to revise the registration: a complicated, buggy, and unnecessarily long process. We cut four pages down to two, gave the site a proper message, and added a Facebook login/sign up option.
We went banshee on the interface and stripped out anything we felt was unnecessary or in need of further development. We simplified the navigation and made the new Progress page the default. Proper action calls were developed and much attention given to fitness goals. The icon-only Share menu was replaced with a textual, content-sensitive mutton.
Though limited time prevented us from doing all we’d hoped with version 1, we managed to crank out a leaner and meaner UI that was far superior to the slow loading, Las-Vegas-meets-lawn-furniture aesthetic of before (pardon the hint of bitterness).
iPhone app
Though in some ways a pretty cool app, Strands for iPhone was frustrating to learn and wasn’t particularly convenient on the go. Furthermore it also was larger in file size than it needed to be with more settings and theming options than you could throw a stick at.
I worked up a theme named “Dum Dum” that put the most frequently used mobile options up front and used a single theme. We cut the size by approximately half. We also got a bump in speed, at least on the iPhone 3G where things run pretty slow these days.
On a related note, Strands Fitness for iPhone has been made the outstanding app section in the App Store of Spain. And we haven’t officially announced it, yet (as of time of writing).
Conclusion
Given the time we had to do all this (and so much more than I’ll describe here), I’m pretty happy. Getting Strands Fitness in shape (pardon the pun) has gone amazingly well. Our goals of a simplified, easy to learn and use fitness app are being realized, but we’re not the kind of team that’s easily satisfied so expect many more improvements as time goes on.
Roles: Design: web, UI, UX. CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails.