Bird
OVERVIEW
Bird is a new, modern, and personalized coaching platform that helps coaches easily create customized training for athletes, collect athlete feedback, and monitor their progress. Bird also supports athletes at all levels by giving them acess to personalized training plans and expert coaches based on their interests and needs. The platform is broken down into three main features; an athlete portal, a coaching portal, and a marketing site. The current athlete portal is an application existing in the Apple Store and Android marketplace assisting athlets to see their daily workouts and communicate with their coaches. The coaching portal is a web application, app.bird.coach, that exists to enable coaches to set up their training plans for athletes. The marketing site operates as a way to communicate all of the varying features that bird offers, and it was re-designed, currently in development. This is a all encompassing product designed for running, relationships, and community.
The Problem
When I joined Bird in July 2020, the product was really defined as a MVP with many missing functionalities. Through many hours of research, Bird uncovered that coaches need to be supported too. Many coaches expressed that whether it was because of complex tools, tedious processes, overwhelming data, or bad communication that they spent more time figuring out how to manage their time then actually focusing on their athletes. There was a large need for the ability to deliver customized training plans to athletes while also collecting athlete feedback and tracking their progress. Because of the many varying coaching tools, often times it can be hard to know what to use, how to use it, and be the most effective when working with athletes. Coaches also needed a way to seperate data in a way that made sense, for the athlete and for them. Looking at coaches pain points also revealed that athletes were also having problems specifically with keeping track of their data and needed an easy way to log their training. Initially, Bird created a text message system to send out notifications to athletes asking them if they completed their workouts. While this was a beginning solution, increasing 25% more of a response rate using this method, it was still not meeting the needs of all the types of users.
Design Process
It was clear that with the design of Bird, there needed to be an alignment between the product vision and strategy with user feedback. By focusing on the extensive research that Bird had completed, I dissected the pain points of both coaches and athletes to clearly understand their goals and needs. After this process, it was crucial to access the existing text message system and understand how the higher response rate data was impacting what users really needed. Through an initial low-fidelity wire-framing process, I was able to transform the coaching and athlete feedback into understandable information architecture. This is what led to the much needed improvement of the athlete portal, coach portal. The athlete and coach portal already existed when I joined bird. The Marketing site though, however, was truly my creation. Once we were able to see what made the most sense for users, content then began to solidify through collaboration with the start-up founders. Content organization helped us start to ideate on the higher fidelity application screens and prioritize new application features that eventually turned into ongoing design reviews, interaction and visual design implementation, and prototyping.
Onboarding Redesign Prototype Video
Solution & Success Measure
Within 6 months of collaborating with Bird, I was able to design and deliver the following main features.
Bird integration with Strava integration.
Athlete Onboarding flow redesign
All Email campaign/communication designs
Prototyping demos (for investor decks).
Athlete workout input flow
Accounts page redesign for both athletes and coaches
Numerous usability standards and UI updates throughout the platforms
Community (group chat)
Marketing site to its entirety with all 3 break points for each screen and site map.
Design system created in Figma (to streamline the dev. process)
The Phase 2 application product launched in Jan 28, 2021 offering personalized coaching plans to multiple levels of athletes. In addition to this, the founders had asked that the company's site be showcased in a new way to elevate the product, its goals, and how it's making lives easier for both coaches and athletes. Thus, the product's marketing website was re-designed with all the main features in less than 2 months and is currently in development. Based on my design process of flexibility, speed, and commitment to understanding user feedback and the dynamic collaboration with Bird, I was able to help implement many new and usable features and marketing materials.
Bird marketing website user flow
