The ‘Live Outdoor Reality™’ At-Home Rowing Machine
Professional Work / Summer 2020
Project Overview
BACKGROUND: Hydrow is a ‘Live Outdoor Reality™’ at-home rowing machine with live and on-demand rows featuring world-class athletes. What started as a crowdfunding campaign, is now poised as the "Peloton of rowing". Hydrow is sold as a full-body workout coupled with an immersive experience that takes you on waterways around the world.
Features include live rows as well as access to a library of workouts, a social feed with a friends list to help you to stay in touch with the Hydrow community, progress tracking, milestones and achievements, workout history, and more.
PROBLEM STATEMENT: Hydrow is a movement. It is an experience without boundaries. How can we create a product that can change in-home fitness forever? How can Hydrow create a fitness journey from concept to reality for thousands of potential rowers?
by creating a brand-new Hydrow story. Following the principles of user-centered design and create a truly unique, immersive experience of a 'fitness journey' that the Hydrow was built for.
REQUIRED GOALS:
- Align the Hydrow experience perfectly with Hydrow's mission as a company: To create an innovative new product that will stand out from its category while bringing the experience of rowing on the water to an indoor user.
- Create an experience that easily provides access to our incredible workouts that push body and mind.
- Expose beautiful waterways around the world from their own living room.
- The Hydrow should become a positive, healthy habit in our users lives and act as an extension of your overall fitness journey. The Hydrow must be a welcoming, thoughtful, innovative, and engaging experience that makes a positive impact in our users lives.
User Research
Finding the right solution means the design should be informed by comprehensive user research. Building the right experience for the problem at hand requires an explicit understanding of future Hydrow users. I need to know their wants and needs, frustrations, fears and motivations. To truly champion the user, I use a user centered design philosophy. I base my designs on clear understanding of their personas. Ideally, Hydrow users should be involved at every step of the design process.
Initially, user data for this project relied on a lean UX process based on assumptions. It meant answering basic questions such as:
- Who are our users?
- What is the product used for?
- When is it used?
- What situations is it used in?
- What will be the most important functionality?
- What’s the biggest risk to product delivery?
At first, design was informed by assumptions. Afterall, our product had not yet launched. UX was based on a combination of best practices, competitor analysis, trend forecasting, and more. Insights were gathered from professional experiences as engineers and designers, fitness enthusiasts, and even professional athletes. Overall, we wanted to ensure that we maintained common established UI and UX patterns throughout our app and to make the on-Hydrow experience as fun and usable as we could for every type of user. We got there by brainstorming with key stakeholders to find a consensus on creative initiatives, user goals and business goals.
Further down the line a more traditional UX strategy was put in place. Hydrow user research is gathered in a non-linear way. Meaning, the process involved the design team to continuously use their results to review, question, and improve our initial assumptions at different steps through our design cycles.
User data was gathered through a combination of channels including on-site and digital interviews of current customers. Other methods include video submissions, email surveys, A/B testing of feature requests, collecting data through social media interactions, metrics within our own app, and analyzing customer feedback.
USER PERSONAS: The outcome of user research led to the creation of unique user personas. User personas are created by a combination of qualitative and quantitative user data gathered from research. The user personas were used to create stories that got us from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ to meet specific goals.
Through user analysis, we can learn how to use the user’s perceptions, actions, motivations, and feelings and integrate these personas into our goal of a positive user experience.
User interview questionnaire example.
Early user persona brainstorming.
Primary Persona: Joanna, 44
Stay-at-home Mom
Married, 2 children
Extrovert
Key Motivations:
Reaching fitness goals.
A supportive community.
Sharing progress.
Wants:
- A way to stay motivated, even when she doesn’t feel like rowing.
- A sense of identity and belonging to a positive community.
- A way to stay connected with workout friends.
- A friendly, welcoming interface.
Frustrations:
- Overwhelmed by choices.
- Doesn’t have the time with two kids and chores to find the right workout every single time.
- Having to take more steps than necessary to get to the right thing.
- Doesn’t like the pressure of competition.
SOLUTION: Create a purpose-driven, goal-oriented Hydrow experience by creating a fun, welcoming, and immersive experience. Content should be the focus and to the point. The design will be fun, welcoming, positive, and thoughtful and will address the whole Hydrow experience by involving our users wants and needs at every step along the way. The design will include multidisciplinary skills and perspectives from the entirety of the Hydrow team and the experience will be informed by user research.
The Hydrow was designed for optimal performance. Its frame and ergonomic body was was crafted to to look sleek and sophisticated. Between the user and the Hydrow itself is a 22” touchscreen display.
Ideation
Once we grew to understand our primary users and created user persons, it was time to start ideating. We had a foundation in place and now it was time to start telling the story. From an idea to implementation, I used standard UI/UX processes from brainstorming, wireframing, flow charts, low and high fidelity mockups, and used interactive prototypes at every opportunity.
I landed on a UX design based on everything I learned from the user research process and by holding interviews with key stakeholders within Hydrow to find a consensus on the final solution.
Example of wireframing
A preview of the style guide.
One of many whiteboarding exercising the beginning planning stages.
Visual Design
The UI aims to be simple, elegant, efficient, easy to use, consistent, and where content is to the point. The UI should look good and perform better. Visually, it is designed to be welcoming, friendly, and inviting. The following images display a range of visual designs and experiences during different design stages of the Hydrow mobile app. Some are current designs and some are concepts.
I designed this content to have the perfect balance of process, inspiration, and practice.
This is the latest 'Home Screen.' In action, there is a dynamic looping video preview that invites the user to hop on and gives you a glimpse of your unique ‘Recommended For You’ row. This row is automatically generated based on your rowing history and preferences.
The home screen is designed to be colorful and playful, but most importantly welcoming and easy to understand and eliminate any feelings of overwhelming choice.
The goal here is to simply present a user with a row without making them give it any more thought. If the user wants to explore more, they simple scroll up to see plenty of more choices.
This is a branded example of our home screen in action. A customer shopping inside Best Buy would see this displayed on a Hydrow on the showroom floor.
This is to demonstrate a limited demo mode to potential buyers through Best Buy.
I experimented with many 'welcome experiences'. Using the Hydrow is meant to be pleasant, fun, and welcoming. This includes elements of sounds and sight that encourage you to be 'on the water' and rowing every day.
One of many whiteboarding exercising the beginning planning stages.
Hydrow is meant to be an extension of you and your fitness journey.
'Waking up' your Hydrow should present you with a cathartic feeling. We don't want our users seeing a workout machine as intimidating or unwelcoming. Creating a calming, peaceful experience means crafting small details such as ripples of water, and sounds of a splashing river designed to be tranquil.
The following images are some examples of the UI during an active workout. The idea was to have an unobtrusive UI that was big, simple, and easy to see. The focus should always be on the row itself, with secondary elements visible and open to the user should the user choose to explore further.
Many leaderboard designs were explored. This probably is the most important element to the user outside of the workout itself. It should cater to the many types of user personas, ranging from casual users to the more extreme, competition oriented users.
Here is one example out of many of a different type of leaderboard. In this case, we tested a fun new 'bump board'.
After the user finishes a row, we wanted to encourage them to try one of our many 'cool down rows'. In this case, we gave them a simple but beautiful and encouraging pop-up that is easily dismiss able.
Implementing this post-row pop-up gave us a huge bump in the amount of rows per user.
We had to keep in mind that the on-Hydrow experience is unique in that our UI always need to be big. Our user will always be in a seated position and within an arms length from the screen. Often, the user would be in a workout and would need quick access to certain UI elements. We had to make our buttons and fonts big and easy to read and navigate.
Hydrow has hundreds of live and on-demand rows with new workouts filmed daily. Rowing in real-time, seeing and feeling the water, and moving in sync with our athletes is what our users wanted. More importantly however, is they wanted options. We designed many ways to explore and customize your Hydrow experience, ranging from music and sound levels, fitness levels, finding and interacting with friends, customizing your avatar and more.
After speaking with our users, we found out that many really wanted a way to customize their avatars to give it more of a personal feel. We added the ability to upload your picture as well as a way to choose a custom oar 'blade' as part of your identity. This oar is now your own personal 'flare' to show off.
We created hundreds of custom oars including world flags, US states, colleges, and special interests.
The oar is displayed during your workout on the leaderboard but also in places like our social feed. It gives our users a fun new way to display something about themselves.
Personalizing your Hydrow experience was important to us and our users. Based on feedback, we designed a way for rowers to favorite a workout as well as a way to filter. Adding these options created a more engaging experience and brought back users to find the rows they like the most.
We created an easy to use Library with big vibrant buttons. Analytics showed that users typically had more than one filter selected, so we stayed with a multi-select filter approach over single-select.
The Hydrow was designed to be immersive and authentic. The experience meant bringing the power of your team and the beauty of the water to you.
This is our social media feed. A quick glance at your friends activities, latest comments, and a fun way to show encouragement.
Hydrow created a Community Manifesto that outlined what Hydrow stood for and what we wanted to represent on the social media stage. It was clear that our users wanted a way to connect with other members, and to encourage them and motivate them to work together.
Using this information, I designed a social media platform within our app as a quick way to see what your friends are up to and to give them a 'thumbs-up' or leave a positive and encouraging message.
Navigation is handled by a recognizable notifications overlay. The data is presented to be easy to read and big enough to tap from your seated position.
Tapping into an activity card dynamically resizes the interactive area so that you see more content and can easily drill into into other elements such as leaving a comment, or seeing who else gave this workout a 'thumbs-up'.
Another important feature our users requested was a way to find and follow your friends. We designed a simple solution whereupon you could search for your friends, quickly add them, and see who is following you back. You can use your friends list to filter your social feed to see only those you follow on your feed.
Hydrow has many user personas. These range from casual users who don't care about being social, to hardcore athletes who constantly chase numbers and milestones, and to those that belong somewhere in the middle. We introduced the concept of racing as a way to challenge eachother and ad a fun new dynamic to rowing. You can create and manage teams and compete with others to reach the top. This also adds a way to meet fellow rowers and add and interact with them on our social feed.
An important feature for our users was a dashboard where you could see your latest data. Most users find this extremely important to keep them coming back and seeing where and how they can improve. We found users often sharing this screen with each other to show off or motivate others to match them. We wanted to keep this big, easy to read, and easy to navigate.
We soon introduced the concept of badges. Users can now earn these fun new badges and display them in a trophy case. This just adds to the list of reasons that keep our rowers coming back.
One of our user personas is the person who likes a rigid program with a clear goal. We introduced the concept of Programs which includes weeks of hand picked rows that gradually improve your performance over time. Upon completing our variety of programs, our user can earn a badge.
Summary
From the start, the Hydrow was designed with a clear vision, with a story to tell, and included our users at every step. As a result, when Hydrow launched it was an immediate success. Through a collective process involving the many talented people at Hydrow, we now have over 12,000 subscriptions.
The Hydrow now a popular and crucial part of the overall Hydrow fitness journey.
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