Reimagining connected fitness

Overview

Tonal is a connected strength-training machine, powered by electromagnetic weights that provide up to 200 lbs of resistance. Its coach-led personal training programs learn how strong the user lifts, remembers their weights for every one of the 175+ moves, and increases the challenge when they push through PRs.

As Principal Product Designer, I was the most senior designer on the team, responsible for pushing both the mobile and trainer platform experiences forward. I worked with a product manager, engineers, a researcher, and a data scientist to shape the software experience.

Trainer Refresh

Worked with another designer to completely rethink the experience of finding your next workout on Tonal. The original Tonal experience was just a long page of content — you scrolled through to find a workout. This didn’t scale well as they added thousands of workouts and 15+ workout types.

The new home page introduces a top tab navigation that allows the user to browse between a highly personalized home page, a new Explore page to find all other workouts, and a Custom page that allows them to lift as they’d like.

HUD Redesign

Led a full redesign of Tonal’s main workout HUD to include muscle utilization view, weight up and down buttons, and a more coherent progress bar for every workout.

Explore

The new Explore page introduces a simple tabbed navigation hierarchy, quick links to a user’s favorite workouts, and personalized rows of content recommending workouts for them.

Custom Workouts

The new Custom page is for users who want to create their own workouts on the fly, or play back one of their custom workouts created on the mobile app. It also introduces a new “Create a workout” experience powered by the user’s current muscle readiness, and moves that Tonal thinks are right to target those muscles given the specified workout time.

Achievements

Developed a system for motivating members to get stronger, work out more often, and reach their goals faster. The system includes three types:

• Milestones — Tracked progress markers based on workout days and minutes
• Badges — Special or time-sensitive acknowledgement of user behavior that Tonal would like to see more of. Badges are not revealed ahead of time to users, encouraging exploration and rewarding that with surprise.
• PRs — In-workout personal records that are rewarded when users break through a strength, power, or volume record

Once the types of Achievements were designed, they needed to show up in many different ways throughout the product experience on mobile and on Tonal — from push notifications and celebration animations to social shareables, workout summaries, and a trophy case.

Leaderboard

After some earlier freelance work where I delivered a strategy for motivating members, I was asked to come on full-time to deliver on this strategy. The first two projects were Tonal’s Leaderboard and Achievements system.

The final leaderboard design communicates the user’s position relative to others, and is ranked by the days + minutes metric to give every user a level playing field regardless of their strength training capability. Users move up the Leaderboard by working out more often, and can filter it based on their gender and age group to make it more meaningful.

We deliberately avoided choosing a metric that would create an unfair advantage for heavier lifters.