Humber Fitness Center

The Humber Fitness facility serves the north campus of Humber College with the purpose of educating the students, encouraging participating in healthy lifestyle choices, and creating a sense of community. This project was a service review of this facility with the purpose of uncovering client pain points and providing solutions.

humber-college_north-campus-fitness-centre_facility.jpg

Overview

This project was my introduction to Service Design. Service Design, as defined by IDEO, is “the craft of tying together human, digital, and physical interactions over time to create a truly differentiated experience”.

Service Design is a major interest of mine as it combines strategic thinking, problem-solving, creative design and business, which are skills I developed during my education and training as an engineer.

As a service designer, I was tasked with:

Identifying any underlying problems and pain points with the service,
Providing achievable and actionable solutions,
Elevating the client experience.

Discovery Phase

Service Audit

The project began with an audit of the physical space.

This involved me going through the gym during quiet hours and assessing various aspects of the fitness facility. I was accompanied by the Facilities Manager who was able to provide first-hand information during our walk-through. We then sat down together and I conducted an in-depth interview with him to better understand the operational and organizational layout of the service. My final step was to speak with a staff member about their employee experience.

Define Phase

Stakeholder Map

The Stakeholder map was built off of the information gathered from interviews and desk research. It was created to help conceptualize the flow of value exchange between our personas, the frontsage, and backstage and support services.

Persona's and Journey Maps

Key Findings

Patrons have difficulties with the sign-in/reservation system
Unmotivated student staff
Lack of awareness of the fitness classes on campus
Students can feel intimidated by the weight room
Outdated software systems that are not integrated with one another (Human Resources, multiple scheduling software, etc.)
New gym users feel like they don’t know what to do or where to begin

Design Phase

Co-Creation Workshop

I ran a co-creation workshop with 3 other peers to help uncover solutions for why the onboarding

process at the Humber Facilities is so onerous and how to make it more efficient now and in the future.

The Co-Creation Workshop involved 3 team members completing 15 minutes of Brain Writing to come up with solutions to the onboarding pain pain points.

The core problems that needed to be addressed during this workshop:

Humber Facilities' booking system is onerous and requires patrons to go through a tedious check-in process,
The program currently being used is Calendy, which is not ideal for booking,
Patrons have to show their student card and reservation confirmation every time they go to the gym which results in long lines and impatient staff

Solution 1:

Humber app linked to the student account. Students sign the waiver once at the beginning of the

semester.

For entrance to the gym, students would scan a QR code on the app at the front desk and enter the gym.

Help track gym metrics

Solution 2:

Shortening the waiver/attendance sign-in on the Calendy plug-in.

Would take students half the amount of time to complete the gym attendance form.

Solution 3:

Implement the use of large posters (24” x 36”) in the hallway towards the gym entrance to remind students to fill out the waiver form and have their student ID ready to show the front desk attendants.

Develop Phase

Service Blueprint

The last step completed to optimize and redesign the service was the creation of a service blueprint. The Service Blueprint allowed us to visualize the relationships between different parts of the fitness facility system (front stage, backstage, support processes) and to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, which were highlighted in the diagram.

Reflections

Through this process of redesigning a service, I was exposed to the complexities that exist to keep a system running. I discovered how to model and connect the front stage, backstage and support processes and how important it is to understand their relationships with eachother and the overall health of a system.

I really came to love service design as it plays to the problem-solving skills I built during my engineering degree and professional experience. I can’t wait to learn more!

Additionally, usability testing on the final prototype would have helped us identify any pain points in the app that were not apparent to us as designers.