Guest kiosk - Club Automation
Overview
Club Automation is a SAAS web application designed to help fitness clubs manage every aspect of their operations, from member management to appointment scheduling.
Through a series of onsite customer visits and listening sessions with fitness club staff, I discovered a common need amongst customers: a more efficient way to capture guest information, while helping to reduce the club’s carbon footprint.
Understanding the Problem
Over and over I kept hearing, “it’s too much paperwork!” or “the whole process takes too long!” Customers were clearly frustrated with their current process for capturing contact information when a guest walks into the club, but I needed to see it for myself. I observed several busy front desk staff in their working environment – phones ringing, current members checking in or asking questions – as guests walked in the door.
The process was tedious, to say the least. At a minimum, a prospect had to fill out a personal information form, an interest card, and sign a waiver. Then, a staff member took all the paperwork and manually entered it into Club Automation, once they had an opportunity to do so. Mistakes happened, and paperwork frequently got misplaced. The entire process took much too long and was prone to too many errors.
Sample interests form
Product Vision
Through these customer conversations, I learned some clubs opted to build their own online sign up front-end solution utilizing Club Automation’s APIs.
But, why not build the front end ourselves and offer our customers a full solution to meet their needs?
With this in mind, we identified goals for this feature as a product team.
Reduce time spent by staff entering guest contact information into the system
Reduce mistakes and clean up data entry
Build a tablet friendly solution to allow clubs to go paperless
As a starting point, I did some market research and competitive analysis to understand the current offerings in our market and take inspiration from streamlined sign up forms and flows.
In addition, I facilitated a persona workshop to better understand the role of a front desk staff and created “The Multi-Tasker” persona to share with internal stakeholders.
“The Multi-Tasker” front desk persona
Designs
Once the team had a shared understanding of our target user and goals, I quickly got to work on some mockups to validate with our customers.
Kiosk wireframe and potential feature list
Welcome screen concept
I put together a quick prototype using Sketch and Invision to present to customers for concept validation. I asked a series of questions to gauge interest in the solution, as well as to answer a few outstanding questions we had around different use cases. Overall, customers were excited about the solution and could not wait to be part of the beta testing group.
Development
After a few tweaks based on customer feedback, I built out the high fidelity design and worked closely with engineers to implement the designs. The team built the kiosk as a progressive web app using React.
The prototype can be viewed here.
Final kiosk designs
Results
This functionality went to beta with some of our largest customers and received rave reviews. Sales has been able to sell the beta version to numerous clubs and found that there is strong demand for this product.
Future Iterations
We continue to conduct interviews with current users of the kiosk, as well as potential users of the product, and a common theme has emerged: our customers are operating in a member self-service mindset – desiring features to enable members to manage specific tasks on their own through their mobile app or onsite kiosk.
The ability to purchase a membership through the kiosk is up next. This work is currently in development.