How do we help online fitness coaches with scaling their business?

Lenus eHealth provides a platform that enables online health and fitness professionals to coach clients through customized training and nutrition programs. The unique business case combines software tools with business support.

Much of the coaches interaction with clients takes place through direct messages or via predefined message templates.

The focus for this project was to help coaches automate their communication, in order to help them scale their businesses and handle more clients without the added time. 

Existing feature

Coaches had a simple message automation feature, which could send a message to all clients on “day x” of their course.

Key challenges

As part of continuous discovery we interviewed several coaches about the existing feature and discovered:

Content was delivered in the personal chat, confusing clients and cluttering up the conversation.

The same automated content could only be sent to e.g. both weight loss clients and weight gain clients.

Mapping the data

As part of the research phase, I conducted a quantitative analysis using Metabase to explore anonymized message data. This helped us understand what types of content were most frequently shared by coaches.

The data revealed clear themes such as motivation, learning, and challenges, highlighting the need to distinguish between different content types.

Desired business outcome

Enable coaches to handle more clients without working more hours, by automating repetitive tasks and freeing time for high-quality client interactions.

Approach

Based on the research and interviews with coaches and clients, we wrote down hypotheses and selected the ones, where we saw the highest risk.

Essentially we wanted to understand the mental model of coaches, when they wanted to set up automations. 

We created 2 different concept directions, that explored 2 different mental models. Both concepts had solutions that addressed the hypotheses in different ways. 

We wanted to test our concepts with users to validate our assumptions to reduce the risk we saw.

I facilitated a remote usability test of the 2 different prototypes with 5 coaches. We formulated questions around the features directly linked to each of our hypotheses.

By lining up each hypothesis in a grid with the feedback from each user test, we could easily spot which feature from each concept validated our hypotheses. 

We used these findings as the basis of forming the final concept.

The new automation 
experience

The final product enabled coaches to design and manage their own automation flows - and faster than before.

For instance, a coach could establish a flow for all weight-loss clients and then configure it so specific content was delivered only to female clients. This functionality provided a high degree of flexibility and personalization.

To address the challenges we uncovered, we split automated content into two categories: Messages and Lessons 

Messages
- Still delivered in the chat to keep communication natural.
- Delayed automatically if a client had an unread message, ensuring coaches didn’t overwhelm them at the wrong time.

Lessons 
- Introduced as a new dedicated area in the app, separate from chat.
- Allowed coaches to share motivational content with all clients, while still making it feel personal.
- Provided a library, making it easy for clients to revisit content later.

Learnings 

Launch & Adoption 
When Lessons launched, coaches received a solid introduction to the feature and quickly understood its benefits.

- Existing coaches needed some time to convert their automated messages into Lessons.

- New coaches adopted the feature right away, and Lessons even created opportunities for new business areas by enabling coaches to offer more educational content.

Impact
While we didn’t have the chance to measure long-term business outcomes, beta testing clearly showed that Lessons reduced the time coaches spent answering the most frequent questions.

Reflection
As a designer, I learned how easily internal product discussions can get stuck on specific solutions. By testing both hypotheses and concepts directly with coaches, we were able to move beyond assumptions and focus on what users actually needed.

Contribution 

I worked as UX Lead in a product trio alongside a Product Manager and a Tech Lead. We were part of a group with 4 developers.

Responsibilities
- Led the discovery process, concept development, usability testing, and final product design.
- Facilitated workshops to align the team on key hypotheses and prioritisation.
- Ran creative sessions to generate and evaluate solutions to the identified problems.
- Designed the final implemented product, in close collaboration with frontend developers.