Tracky
A better way to track your gym progress
Disclaimer
This is a conceptual project for a workout tracking app that is currently not live.
The designs, assumptions, and solutions presented are part of a personal passion project and are intended to showcase my design thinking, problem-solving skills, and approach to user experience.
All righty, lets get into the Why’s & What’s…Adding Content to the Canvas
After setting up the content, go back to the canvas. Your collections are accessible from the Insert menu. Open the Insert menu, navigate to the CMS Content section, and drag and drop your collection onto the canvas. This will add a special stack with layers connected to your data. From here, you can edit the visual properties on the right, just as you would do with a regular Stack.
Story time
I’ve been a gym enthusiast since 2020, and over the years, I’ve learned the importance of muscle composition in the human body. One of the most common ways to maintain or build muscle is through strength training. The key to an effective strength training routine is understanding and applying a scientific principle known as “Progressive Overload.”
So, what exactly is progressive overload?
Progressive overload is when you gradually increase the weight, frequency, or number of repetitions in your strength training routine. This challenges your body and allows your musculoskeletal system to get stronger.
I got all Scientific LOL😬, I will try to keep it short…
To maintain or build muscle, it’s crucial for fitness enthusiasts to track their exercises and analyze them on a weekly or monthly basis to ensure progressive overload is being maintained.
So, how do we track and analyze our gym progress today?
Core Problem
Fitness enthusiasts have to track & analyze their exercises during workout session daily to ensure progressive overload is maintained, However they find tracking & analyzing workouts a tedious task and often skip making notes of it many times, which results into incomplete data & missed opportunities for growth and progress, ultimately hindering their ability to achieve their fitness goals.
Who are the Users ?
People who are fitness enthusiasts(Intermediate — Advanced Lifters) who workout in the gym and wants to track their workouts regularly to achieve their fitness goals, often performing workouts without any help of a personal trainer.
According to a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, individuals who track their workouts are 40% more likely to reach their strength and conditioning goals compared to those who do not. Additionally, nearly 60% of gym-goers struggle to track their workouts consistently and accurately according to a study by Bodybuilding.com, often leading to plateauing in progress and missed opportunities for growth.
Why Is It difficult to Track & Analyze Exercises in the Current Behavior?
As a User myself, I analyzed my current behavior for a 2 week period and conducted research. I consider myself as a Tech-Savvy person who uses the “Notes” app on my phone to track workouts.
Let’s break this down…
Time-Consuming Process — Manually recording every detail daily, such as the date, workout routine, exercises, reps, and sets, takes a significant amount of time.
Human Error — I used to copy and paste previous data to save time which introduced errors in my tracking. Sometimes, I forgot to update the pasted details, leading to inaccurate records that did not reflect my actual performance.
Difficulty in Analyzing Data — Even when data is tracked, manually analyzing trends and progress over weeks or months was a pain. The only solution I found was to write everything down into an Excel sheet and analyze it by making charts, which i did not do. Hence, I struggled to identify patterns over a mid-long term duration and make informed adjustments to my routines.
Lack of Consistency — The tedious nature of manual tracking often leads to inconsistency. I skipped taking notes altogether sometimes, leading to incomplete data, which makes it difficult to monitor progress accurately.
This intrigued me into finding more about the problem, So i put on my Product designer hat🤠 to understand more about the problem, because i am not the only potential user.
I interviewed 3 gym buddies to understand more about the problem and to see if there are more problems to solve. One of them was a Beginner and the other two were Intermediate-Advanced type of fitness enthusiasts.
Interview Insights
Incomplete Workout Tracking Due to Distractions — Users sometimes don’t complete tracking each exercise for the day due to some distraction while tracking. However, they often believe they’ve logged their workout in full. There is no indication to show that they haven’t completely tracked their workout for the day.
Lack of Motivation — Users were not motivated enough to track their performances daily.
Skipped Workout Notes — Because users sometimes skipped tracking their workouts, they struggled to confidently select workout volume on the next day, affecting their ability to track progress and maintain consistent training intensity.
“Interesting Insight” : The Double-Edged Sword of Copying and Pasting Workout Notes — Based on my experience, copying and pasting previous workout notes sometimes led to mistakes, like forgetting to update certain details, which could throw off my progress tracking. However, some users who track while working out found that copying & pasting helped them visually identify what they did in the last record and remember to do more or at least match their previous performance.
I found out many problems needed to be solved & hence “Tracky was born”.
What is Tracky?
Tracky is a mobile application which helps fitness enthusiasts to track and analyze their performance in the gym.
Lets get right into the features of the application, I will explain how these features addressed the problems found and the user flows along with them.
Features of Tracky
Making Routines
Reducing the extra effort of writing exercises names each day.
One reason tracking exercises is so time-consuming is that the “Notes” app doesn’t remember the user’s workout days. As a result, users have to manually rewrite their exercises each day or copy and paste them from previous entries.
What are workout days?
Lifters typically follow a workout routine where each day is dedicated to specific exercises. For example, they might have a Push day, a Pull day, and a Leg day that repeat each week. This routine is typically followed consistently, with the same set of exercises being repeated.
Users generally have 2–3 type of workout days depending upon their choice of routine.
I introduced & Designed a Feature “Routines” through which the users can make their workout days once and for all.
Routines can be later used while tracking on a specific day and will save time from writing exercises names each day.
Tracking workout on the Home screen
While making the home screen i wanted to make sure that the user doesn’t spend time manually writing things that are repetitive, like dates and exercises names, while also addressing some of the other problems found.
Reducing the Time Taken to Track Workouts.
Users have to manually track every detail, such as the date, workout routine, exercises, reps, and sets, which takes a significant amount of time & leads to missed tracking workouts sometimes.
By including features like “Routines” & “Day selector” users can now potentially save time, resulting into less hindrance while tracking.
Decreasing the Chances of Missed Tracking Due to Distractions While Tracking.
Users sometimes don’t complete tracking each exercise for the day due to some distraction while tracking, However, they often believe they’ve logged their workout in full.
Here’s how i designed a solution for it —
Case 1 — Users who have created Routines
Case 2— Users who haven’t made Routines yet.
Here’s how the User flow looks like for tackling this problem —
Motivating Users to Track daily and Not Miss a Day.
Tracking Exercises can still be a daunting task, & some users are not enough motivated some days to track their performances, which leads to inaccurate records.
Hence, I introduced a proven concept called “Streaks” in the app, which could essentially keep users motivated to grow their streak number.
The streak number will keep on increasing as soon as they complete tracking for a day. This is something they can flaunt to their gym buddies😎.
Exercise Listing
The exercise listing is one of most important parts of the home page while tracking. This is where users will spend a lot of time tracking exercises.
Let’s go through the Design Iteration for this Component.
Up to this point, all of the features explained were part of the home page. Now, let’s jump into the actual tracking experience of exercises.
Recording sets/reps for Individual exercise.
Users would still have to manually add their reps/sets/weight or even other attributes such as time/distance depending upon the type of exercise.
Helping the users with Pre-filled Information and visual indicators.
Users had to search for the last log of the exercise they performed, check the reps, weight, and sets, and then proceed with the current workout. For many users, locating the previous entry was challenging and added unnecessary friction to their routine.
They also had to ensure they were making progress, which made remembering the sets, reps, and weight from the previous log even more challenging. Users often had to repeatedly check their previous entries while tracking the current day’s exercise, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming.
While designing the tracking experience, I wanted the users to not do a lot of back and forth for the above mentioned things. This would add to the tracking experience.
Analytics system
Ensuring that the fitness enthusiasts are quickly able to analyze their workouts and exercises on a short- to long-term view was the main goal here.
Improving the Way Fitness Enthusiasts Analyze their Exercise Performance
Fitness enthusiasts often want to review their overall performance in the gym to ensure they’re on track to achieve their fitness goals. But the current method of analyzing data through an Excel sheet is very time-consuming, leading many users to skip it altogether.
By having a dedicated analytics section available, fitness enthusiasts can quickly access their data exercise-by-exercise without needing to manually make charts in Excel. This feature also helps them to stay on track for their fitness goals, and make changes if needed.
Making Workout Tracking Easier to Monitor
One of the most important parts of the application was to know how much the users are logging/tracking their workouts and how many times they have missed logging workouts. To have accurate analytics of their workouts, correct tracking was a prerequisite.
I wanted to make sure that the users could easily see how much they have been tracking.
I made many Iterations for this problem to solve but eventually landed on two of them:
Iteration — 1 : Calendar View
Iteration — 2: Bar Graph View
Both of these Iterations had their pros & cons, which made it difficult to choose one over the other.
Final Solution
Instead of selecting one option without enough data from user testing, I decided to keep both the options “Bar-graph View” & the “Calendar View”, and let the user decide which one they want to opt for at the moment.
Going forward, we could analyze the user behavior and make changes in future versions.
Notifications
Although Notifications is not part of Product-Design, I though how as a company do we make sure that the user doesn’t miss logging/tracking their workouts & keep them motivated to do so.
Wrapping up!
This project has been a significant learning experience for me as a product designer. It greatly helped my critical thinking skills and taught me how to delve deeply into user behavior, identify issues, and devise effective solutions.
I also learned the importance of questioning design iterations and decisions while seeking feedback from mentors. As a result of this project, I now have a clearer understanding of the design process and how to support app features with solid logic.
Feel free to hit me up on my LinkedIn or Email for any further questions, happy to have a chat.