Design Patterns That Will “Pump You Up”
“I am Hans and I am Franz and we want to Pump You Up!”…any child of the 80’s surely remembers the classic Austrian jock duo from Saturday Night Live skits. I spent many a Saturday night in my youth laughing away at these two.
Now, the Pumping Up with Hans and Franz show concentrated less on exercise and more on humiliation, but I have found a strength training tracker that is serious about helping you get in shape and good design patterns assist their goal beautifully.
After some 15+ years of working out, I had become completely bored with doing the standard assisted strength machines at the gym. Not to mention the fact that as I was getting older, I didn’t feel like they were as effective in toning and building muscle that I wanted. I knew I wanted to mix up my workouts, add in free weights and exercises on the cable machines which I thought were totally cool when I watched people at the gym using them.
But I had no idea what exercises to add to my workout to ensure I hit all muscle groups for a complete workout. I spent tireless hours googling workout routines and specific exercises. It exhausted me! Also, I was so self-conscious about trying to do these new exercises that I googled because, well, don’t even get me started about trying to REMEMBER how to do the exercises once I got to the gym!
Then I discovered JEFIT, a training tracker app that allows you to plan out your workouts move-by-move and track your reps and sets. While JEFIT does have a website, I use the app exclusively due to its convenient nature.
Through doing this exercise, I realised how the design patterns utilised throughout the JEFIT app helped me not only to quickly learn how to use the app but have kept me using it because it doesn’t strain my brain (hey, that could be another Hans & Franz line! 😊) Below, I am going to concentrate on just a few of my favourite design patterns.
Navigation, Tabs and Search
JEFIT has incorporated easy-to-use navigation and search patterns that help users effectively and efficiently get to their workout or search for exercises and workout routines.
Navigation and Tabs
JEFIT has a bottom navigation bar allowing you quick and easy access to primary areas of the app. The navigation bar is easy to understand because it includes icons and text so you aren’t left guessing what each one means. When you launch JEFIT, it opens in the “Workout” area which is helpful to the user because if you are in the gym, you want to get to your workout routines quickly without having to go through a lot of steps.
The “Workout” tab launches with my personally-designed workout routines loaded but I can toggle to see JEFIT-created workout routines if I want to quickly and easily mix it up without creating a new routine myself. This solves my boredom issue.
Search
I find the Search function to be one of the most helpful elements of the app. I am able to get to the search function in a couple of ways:
· When I am building a new workout routine or adding an exercise to an existing routine, I simply click the +Add Exercise to launch the Search function. The +Add Exercise is locked in place at the bottom of the routine screen so as you scroll through the list of exercises in your routine, +Add Exercise is always there.
· Alternatively, if you are not in a particular workout routine, you can click on the “Exercises” icon in the bottom navigation which displays icons of the various body categories that you can target. You can click on a particular body part to see all exercises and then search/filter for further refinement. You can then click on the exercise and choose which exercise routine to add it to.
The search function itself is extensive, providing multiple ways to search for an exercise through an interface that is both visually appealing and functional, thinking of every way you might want to search for an exercise.
You can search by typing keywords into the search bar, click on a specific body part using easy to tap buttons, or click on a specific piece of equipment you want to use which have easily identifiable icons with labels. Or you can use a combination, typing a keyword and using the body parts and/or equipment as filters on your search.
The search is predictive and begins to immediately display exercises that match the keyword being typed in, narrowing the results shown as the user continues to type parameters so the results are not so overwhelming.
No more countless hours spent Googling! Being able to easily zero in on specific exercises for each muscle group solves my issue of ensuring I have a complete workout.
Cards and Carousel
JEFIT utilises Cards in numerous ways throughout the app allowing the user to quickly preview the information and click for further details.
· When you open the app, as I mentioned, you are on the Workout tab which utilises cards to display the different workout routines you have created which provides a quick snapshot of the number of exercises in the routine and estimated time to complete for the number of reps and rest time between reps you have designated in your settings.
· Click into a specific workout routine and you see a similar card layout displaying each exercise with a quick snapshot of planned number of reps and rest time. From here, you can click on each exercise to display a larger card where you get more detailed information such as history log, notes and detailed instructions and video for performing the exercise.
· Once you start a workout, your routine is displayed in a bigger card format in a carousel window that easily moves along with you as you go through your workout.
Autoplay
For an added bonus of convenience as well as confidence, the cards that display each exercise when your workout is in progress contain a quick video tutorial that autoplays, so while you are working out, you can easily see how the exercise is performed. You can click on the video to see a larger format as well as detailed instructions.
And, you guessed it, by not only having video tutorials, but having them front and centre playing as I am doing my workout solves my self-consciousness issue.
As you can see, JEFIT has excellent design patterns to “pump you up”…now if only it had a zapper feature to give me a little shock in the morning to get me up to go workout 😊
