Silofit

Product Design (UX-UI)
Company: Silofit
Head of Design & co-founder: Johan Rosell
Year: 2021

Unlocking access to private fitness spaces

Silofit is the world’s first network of on-demand fitness spaces, converting small offices into private micro-gyms that can be rented by the hour using the Silofit app, available on the App Store for iOs and Google Play for Android. The original idea was to target busy professionals looking to squeeze in a workout in their busy schedules. Still, Silofit soon decided to expand its services and provide an ecosystem for fitness professionals to manage their businesses. The first Silo was established in Montreal in January 2019. Since then, Silofit has expanded to Toronto and Miami. As the second designer joining the Silofit team, my first responsibilities were to audit the existing mobile apps, design new features connecting gym-goers and trainers, redesign the Silofit website, and set the foundations for a complete design system, all in collaboration with the Product, Brand and Leadership teams.

A continually evolving brand

From its debut in 2017, the Silofit brand underwent several iterations based on new insights and pivoting business needs. Below is an example of one of the early iterations through which the main Silofit mobile app went, as explained in more detail in Johan Rosell’s portfolio, Silofit’s co-founder and Head of Design. The beige colour was introduced to bring a mindfulness feel before being replaced with a darker palette right that was more fitting for the fitness market when I joined the start-up in 2021.

Laying the design foundations for the next evolution of the Silofit ecosystem

When I joined Silofit, one of my first mandates was to develop a visual language for the company’s various digital products based on the new branding strategy. I started laying the foundations for a design system to help us reach our goal more efficiently and ensure brand cohesiveness.

The Brand team was finalizing the company’s new brand book, which served as a solid reference for our design system, from the company’s values and tone of voice to our design principles, patterns and components.

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Below is an excerpt from the 2021 Silofit Brand Book developed by the Brand team, which served as our principal reference to establish the Silofit visual language in our digital spaces (apps, website, and social media communication...).

While working on the Silofit Design System, I had the opportunity to develop two sets of illustrative icons and product illustrations to help us convey the brand personality in the Silofit mobile apps.

Two mobile apps for a two-sided market

Silofit was born from the idea of offering a solution to busy professionals looking to squeeze in a workout in their busy schedule without the commitment of a gym membership. Additional market and user research showed an opportunity to empower fitness and wellness professionals, helping them operate their businesses and grow their earnings.

A dedicated Pro app allows fitness professionals using Silofit private gyms (Silos) to manage their scheduling and clients’ workout requests more efficiently.

User flow 1: Onboarding and setting up a gym-goer profile in the Silofit app

The first user flows I started contributing were both apps’ onboarding/profile setup experiences. We focused on our gym-goer persona’s journey first, from downloading the Silofit app to setting up their personal account and profile, offering the guidance of an onboarding wizard and step-by-step process. Our main goal was to update the UI components to integrate Silofit’s recent new branding in the apps first, keeping UX optimizations recommendations for the next phase.

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The Silofit app’s home page consists of a Google map showing “Silopins” for the different Silos locations.

User flow 2: Onboarding and setting up a trainer profile in the Silofit Pro app

The second flow focused on our fitness professional persona’s journey of downloading the Silofit Pro app, creating an account and setting up their profile. We re-used the onboarding wizard from the Silofit app, prompting trainers to provide as much relevant and exhaustive information as possible to establish trust and professionalism, resulting in even more steps.

Both onboarding and setup flows could be optimized to improve our users’ first experience with Silofit apps and help the business acquire more active users. The setup wizard had too many steps, which could overwhelm and discourage our users before they could even book a Silo for a workout session through the app. Motivating oneself to schedule and go to a workout session can already be complicated, and we could do a better job helping our users cross that finish line. After all, our onboarding and setup process should feel like a light warm-up, not a full HIIT workout.

We brainstormed a few UX recommendations to optimize the onboarding experience for our following implementation:
→ Let users create an account and explore what the apps have to offer before prompting them to complete their profile and give personal or professional information;
→ Communicate the value and benefits of completing an exhaustive profile;
→ Be transparent about why Silofit is asking for so much information, like location tracking, for instance;
→ Make all optional steps visibly skippable, or consider relocating them to another part of the user’s journey (“Settings” menu, for example...).

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The Profile section is a core screen of the Silofit Pro app.

Shifting focus: how can Silofit help personal trainers grow their business?

The Design team regularly collaborated with Jennifer, our dedicated UX researcher, on various journey mapping and brainstorming workshops (like the Crazy 8 framework). This helped us refine our understanding of our dual target audience (gym-goers and fitness professionals). It benefited our problem-framing and ideation process for the company’s next focus: helping personal trainers grow their business and clientele.

To do so, we worked on introducing in the Silofit app two new features that would help promote personal trainers to “Silo-goers”:
→ Add a personal trainer to your Silo booking;
→ Purchase a trainer’s intro offers package and use it to pay for your next scheduled session.

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In parallel to the design work for the Silofit mobile apps and the Design System foundations, I worked on various visual design initiatives for the Marketing team, providing graphic material and animations for Silofit’s social media accounts, as well as a complete redesign of the website.