How might we enhance the climbing gym experience to foster progress, creativity, and community for climbers, while also providing valuable insights and for owners and setters?
Background
Climbing has been a popular sport, discipline, and lifestyle for decades. As a disciple, bouldering outpaces all other forms in popularity, and recent inclusion in the Olympics has only fueled the increase of indoor climbing gyms, and the rise of social media showcasing the sport.
Why now?
As a result of climbing’s continued rise, there’s a growing opportunity for technology to support climbers in training, social connections, and owners and route setters in operations.
What's bugging climbing?
The main challenges, solutions, and possible results.
These are some of the core challenges I came across, proposed solutions, and the expected outcomes.
Progress tends to plateau
Climbing grades are a basic, but limited benchmark to track one’s progress.
Provide progress tracking
Give climbers a visual overview of their climbing progress over time.
Informed climbers
are climbers that stay engaged and excited in their progress and in their gyms.
Establishing a good routine
Serious progress requires intentional training, but it’s hard to know what’s right.
Provide tailored routines
Every climber is different. Their routines and training should account for this.
Healthy and safe habits
Regular training + warmup and cooldown routine = less injury and more progress!
The first-time experience
and gym atmosphere are big determinants if new climbers become regulars.
Revamp route accessibility
Community routes and curated lists ensure there’s something for everyone.
An inclusive atmosphere
There’s a place and abundance of routes for everyone regardless of level.
A lack of quality feedback
Setters and owners want to improve, but actionable feedback can be a rare.
More ways to engage
Like, comment, share, and rate routes. Plus the ability to upload beta videos.
An engaged community
That continues to grow and learn new ways to support each other’s journeys.
Objectives and success metrics.
How do we know we’ve made it?
I wanted to define objectives to refer to throughout, and at the end of the design process to determine if the design is successful.
Success metrics:
Be compelling
But not just visually. It must incorporate features that users actually want to use and incorporate.
Be personal
One size won’t fit all. Does it provide for as many unique users as possible and their varied needs?
Be habit-helpful
By empowering climbers of all levels to cultivate helpful habits and achieve their goals.
The Outcome
An application that empowers climbers to tailor their individual journey while fostering a supportive and engaged community for all.
Research & Insights
As a climber, I needed to avoid bias and get a more holistic overview.
What’s my angle?
Owners, setters, and climbers are all passionate about climbing, but they may be worlds apart in terms of needs and goals.
I didn’t want to assume I’d address everyone’s needs in the first iteration, but I also wanted to provide as much value as possible from the start. I approached research with a focus on:
Needs & Pains
of owners, routes setters, and climbers.
Habit formation
What does it take to go from hobby to habit?
Competition
How do existing apps address needs and pains?
Interviews & Affinity Mapping
Climbers struggle with training and progression, while route setters and gym owners face challenges in route management and feedback.
I interviewed 10 individuals who have been climbing from 2-20+ years! Two are gym owners, three work as route setters, and 5 are just regular climbers.
I asked questions about:
Their climbing and/or work history
Their approach, goals, and challenges in climbing/their job
A day in their life at the gym
About any tools, apps, or methods they use
I organized and assed the results using an affinity map of observations, positives, negatives, direct quotes, and inferred or explicit needs.
Interviewee Insights
Provisional personas derived from the affinity map.
After affinity mapping and analyzing insights, I started to see the potential beyond "a climbing app" as I had originally envisioned.
Climbers
Love the social and challenge aspects.
May run out of routes if they climb more than 2-3 times per week.
Face a long-term progress plateau and may not know how to continue.
It’s unclear how to establish a good warmup/cooldown/training routine.
Setters
Enjoy the creative aspect of setting.
Want to improve their craft and are eager to apply feedback.
Gather ‘feedback’ by watching climbers on their routes. But it’s time-consuming.
There is no easy and effective way to track and manage routes.
Owners
Work hard to foster a supportive and welcoming community.
Stay involved in as much as possible to keep their finger on the pulse.
Regret that they cannot ensure an ideal experience for every new climber.
No consistent way to get good feedback.
Secondary Research
“To start using an app was unnecessary, [climbers] had a different way of thinking about [routes at the gym] and there was no actual benefit for them to use it.”
- Route Setter
This quote from a route-setter gave me a eureka moment.
I knew I wanted to explore and incorporate gamification, but this made it clear that I was thinking too simply and also had to focus on habits. It also helped me determine that I had to put climbers first. No matter how much value the app brings to setters and owners, it’ll be useless if climbers don’t adopt it!
With that in mind, I read the book “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, and took a deep dive into what makes Nike Run Club and Strava, two key players in the space, successful.
Here are my key takaways:
The Hook Model
Engage Habits
A successful product engages users habits.
External Triggers
Engagement begins with an external trigger.
Motivate Users
By providing the outcomes they desire.
Rewards
Motivation isn't enough. Users also need rewards.
Provide a Solution
to user's problems if you want them to build a habit.
Use Responsibly
Don't abuse users' habits. Would I use the product?
Nike Run Club & Strava
Community
People keep people active, not your app. They engage around your app.
Define the Core
Understand what’s necessary for engagement and add value to that.
Celebrate!
Every achievement, every milestone. Keep it simple, but make it personal.
Avoid Friction
Everything is better with friends. Make it easy to join and to start using the app.
Don’t Force
motivation or engagement. Provide the value but keep it optional.
Competitive Analysis
Most climbing apps tend to focus on one discipline or training, and those that offer a well-rounded experience usually lack a satisfactory and worthwhile free model.
I looked into 15 competitors in the climbing, fitness, and exercise sector and ultimately chose 6 to do a feature competitive analysis.
I also created a visual mapping of their flows where applicable:
Login & onboarding
Home-feed/page and social features
Creating content
Finding and starting an activity
Profile and statistics
Takeaways
Analyzing non-climbing competitors helped me see gaps in climbing apps.
Nike Run Club and Strava were nailing it in basically every category.
Strava has an excellent freemium model.
NRC is totally free, but uses their app to get you to buy their gear.
Other competitors generally covered the core features + one other area.
My Plan:
To match the features offered by climbing-competitors and improve on:
Personalized onboarding
Training Plans
Achievements
Challenges
Synthesis & strategy
Identifying core features and structure.
Target-User Profiles
Climbers will be the MVP's target users.
Interview findings helped me go beyond provisional personas to create persona cards paired with empathy maps. This way I could focus on the broader aspects of users' goals, needs, emotions, and tasks related to climbing.
Features & Prioritization
Though climbers would be the target users, it was still important to consider what features would be useful on the setter/management side as well.
I used the competitive and heuristic analysis, as well as insights from interviews to identify opportunities and features. I prioritized them using an NNG impact-effort matrix to help me determine MVP features and filter out-of-scope features.
The resulting features fell into four broad categories:
Core Features
The features that any climbing app should have: setting, logging, and providing relevant info about the routes.
Social Features
Support and enhance the positive social-aspects at the gym. From checking-in, to following, liking, commenting, and more.
Personalization
Climbers come in all shapes, sizes, and experience levels, these are the features that provide a tailored experience to each individual.
Motivation & Habits
Targeting what makes each climber tick. Whether it’s reminders, goal setting, preset sessions, routines, or a challenge to complete!
Flows
I used features to map out flows of core user tasks.
Mapping flows of key tasks gave me an idea of what screens I'd have to design. Afterwards, I mapped the tasks into a user flow to get a better sense of the architecture.
The key tasks for a climber using the MVP would be:
Onboarding & Signup
Starting and completing a session
Creating and logging a climb
Joining a challenge
Concept
Drafting the first route.
Touchpoints
Phone
Notifications
Climbing walls
Exercise equipment
Ideation & Wireframes
I began with crazy 8’s sketching to challenge myself to stick to necessary pages and to carefully consider user inputs.
I wanted to keep pages to a minimum to avoid bloat that would make the app inconvenient to use at the gym.
It was most important to nail was the sessions flow. It's the main value proposition that also uses the core feature of logging routes, it has to be well put-together to bring value to climbers and keep them coming back.
Design
Welcome to Prob
Hi-Fidelity Design
These are the key moments a climber would encounter:
By using features and flows to design around key tasks and moments, I can approach the interface with a a more holistic and flexible view.
Onboard and Goal setting
First Time Experience
Prob aims to provide more than just routes on the wall. Climbers set their current level, experience, and goals so that their sessions and trainings can be tailored specifically for them.
Home Feed
What’s New?
A quick jumping-off point for the social and stoke aspects of the gym. Climbers can see who’s at the gym and what routes other climbers are creating or climbing.
Sessions
A personalized session in just a few clicks.
Sessions are designed to help climbers maintain direction and purpose in their climbing. By setting duration, focus, and difficulty, climbers are provided appropriate warmups, climbs, and cooldowns that match their needs and make it easy to build a healthy climbing-routine.
Routes
A familiar guidebook format and creative outlet.
Climbers may not always want a tailored session.
The ability to create routes beyond those set by the gym provides a creative outlet for climbers that have run out of new routes to climb. Additionally, commenting, and providing beta videos on routes set by their peers provides a new way to engage at the gym.
Optional Challenges
Challenge accepted!
From training, levels, and streaks, to making sure you visit enough to make the membership worth it, there’s a challenge for everyone if they choose to rise to the occasion. Prob makes it easy to see which of your friends are in on the challenge, or to invite those who should be!
Profile & Logbook
Logs and ascents in one place.
The profile section utilizes familiar social media/ forum patterns to give climbers a quick view into their stats, achievements, and engagement with climbs they’ve set. It’s also where you can find automatic and self-curated lists to be edited or shared.
Visual System
A card-based design system with a focus on displaying most-relevant info and consistent interactions.
Prob has multiple offerings, from route creation, logging, challenges and full sessions. I focused on visual and input consistency to minimize cognitive load and increase learnability.
Usability & Iteration
What do climbers think of Prob?
I conducted unmoderated user testing with 15 participants. The concept was very well received. The majority of issues and skipped tasks were caused by some blunders of my own making... read on to learn about my fumbles!
Flows I tested:
Setting up and conducting a session
Joining a monthly challenge
Finding routes and logging a climb
Creating a new route
Accessing engagement/notification info for a route
Participants
Testers were a good representation of climbing’s current demographics.
According to the AAC State of Climbing report (2019), 65% of all climbers are 18-35 years old. The test participants, their years of climbing, and self-assed level aligned well with climbing's main demographics.
Successes
Probs' concept was very well received!
7m 45s
Average completion time
Completion times were reasonable at an individual task level as well. With a few exceptions noted below!
66%
Task completion rate
May seem not-so-great, but problematic tasks were largely due to my prototype blunders. Well prototyped tasks were a breeze for users.
Sessions
were a hit!
Over 1/3 of user took time to leave positive feedback about the concept or the session-builder feature.
Users explored
key features in depth.
Heat maps and journeys show that users went all-in and really explored different session settings and setting their own routes!
“I love the concept of this app.”
“Session focus is a very cool feature!.”
“I liked the session that was built for me! It was very clear and made me want to get off my seat and try. :)”
“I liked [the] variety of focuses and challenges one can choose from.”
“Loved the way you can select the type of session you want to do and build the warmups and everything.”
Improvements
Some actions weren’t clear and I made some silly prototype mistakes.
Interaction
Before
After
Sessions
Session types and how to start a session was unclear.
The task called for users to “Start your own 45 minute session.” and multiple users attempted to click on the “45min Climb” open session card instead of clicking the “Start” button as I'd intended.
I attempted to simplify the information shown on the page and clarify the difference between an open session and starting your own.
Routes
Finding a comment on a route that you set was difficult.
The initial design only allowed user to find the comment through notifications, which many users didn’t notice at first. Instead, many went directly to the “Profile” or “Routes” pages.
I redesigned based around user-expectations by:
Adding quick filters in the routes page
Creating a “My Routes” tab in the profile section
Making the notification icon more prevalent
Copy Issues
I need to watch my language...
One task said “Your friend Andre set a new route” and then asked users to climb and log it.
See the red spot in the middle of the heat-map? 👉🏼Users read “new route” and wanted to use the “New Routes” tab on the home screen to complete the task. This led to some confusion.
I revised the copy from “New Routes” to “Routes” and updated the card design to improve hierarchy. I guess I need to watch my leading language!
Interaction
Before
After
Outcome & future Roadmap
Climbers are on-board. How do we go beyond MVP?
Business Impact
My goal was to enhance the experience for climbers and provide insights to owners and setters. Did I succeed?
As supported by my research findings, climbers became the target user group but I wanted to bring value to everyone, including owners and setters.
Here’s what I believe Prob achieves:
Tackles routine and habits
The positive response to Sessions bodes well for habit-building. Climbers who can’t attend gym-organized classes due to scheduling or space constraints can progress on their own schedule.
Everyone can engage
Gyms can also post routes to get stats and insights, and even videos of attempts. They can also observe what other routes are popular and how climbers are engaging in comments and open sessions.
Value and motivation at all levels
A route, session, and challenge for everyone. Gyms can’t guide everyone, so make it a community effort! Curated lists, regular open sessions, and leaderboard rewards are just a few ways to start!
Future Roadmap
Probs' next level should be the management-side.
Right now the concept aims to attract and provide value to climbers. Here are additional features I would build out, and how I would continue to develop it to add management-focused features:
Develop Training Screens
I prioritized sessions because not all climbers may be at the training stage. The next step would be to provide training.
Add Management Accounts
This would give owners and setters gym-wide stats and analytics as well as admin moderation capabilities.
Gym-uploaded content
Gyms could upload their own custom exercise videos and training plans to have climbers engage with familiar faces.
Competitions and Challenges
Gyms could hold competitions and create custom badges or challenges that could be tied to membership rewards or prizes.
My Learnings & Challenges
It was important to challenge assumptions throughout, but what would I change?
From the start, I wanted to be sure that designing this system was the best design direction. From there I had to navigate differing stakeholder ideas and distill it all into the most effective design within our limited time-frame. When actually designing, the big challenges were designing effective ways to denote time, and determining how to display key project info.
Here’s what I’d add or do different if the project were to continue:
There’s always something new to be learned
I climb indoors and outdoors, and I’m glad I challenged myself to avoid designing for me. I learned there is a real need to connect everyone involved at the gym, which is more impactful than some ‘cool route setting app’ as I originally envisioned.
Check everything... then check it again!
I made some noobie blunders. I tested my prototype but dropped the ball on testing the unmoderated test. A few kind testers even reached out to me directly to tell me of the technical troubles they had. I need to get better at vetting everything before asking others for their valuable time.
