Equinox Club Search
Equinox has over 100 clubs throughout the US, Canada, and London. Thousands of people utilize the Equinox website to look for a club that matches their needs, but many with no success. The club-searching experience is a crucial use case for both members and non-members. To make sure we provide users with the best experience possible, our Equinox web team revamped the club-searching experience to provide a tailored searching experience for new, current, and past members.
My Role
Lead + solo designer - Discover, Research, Ideate, Design, Tests, Iterate
The Team
• Product Designer (Me)
• Project Manager
• 2 Software Engineers
The Problem
The current club-searching experience is fragmented and a hindrance to many users, especially for those unfamiliar to Equinox. The club search page has the highest traffic on the Equinox website, but many users dropped off the site or gave up on their search before finding a club.
This led us to ask a few questions to help align our user and business goals:
How might we create a valuable searching experience that is engaging for users.
How might we help users find the club they need as seamlessly as possible?
How might we utilize
Our Users
I conducted a series of user interviews to do a deep dive into pain points that users face. I split 14 interviews between moderated and unmoderated to capture unique perspectives. The qualitative data that came from the interviews shed light on a few key areas of improvements:
Searching by location + distance - “I travel pretty often, so it would be nice to see if there are any clubs around me wherever I might be.”
Utilizing the variety of amenities - “Steam rooms are what entice me to Equinox, but I don’t know which clubs have them or not.”
Brainstorming Session
Our team had a few brainstorming sessions (Miro and Figma) to ideate on our earlier findings.
Mapping user journeys
Information Architecture
Our brainstorming team consisted of designers, project managers, engineers, and stakeholders. This melting pot of minds gave us different perspectives to discuss solutions for.
I followed up my brainstorming with competitive analysis and sketching (shown below).
A series of competitive analysis on other websites and products that provided a different service through a similar searching logic: Airbnb, Zillow, DoorDash, Google Maps, Classpass, etc.
I followed up with low-fidelity sketches to solution the different ideas into layouts and flows. A few focus areas included Filtering and Sorting, as well as toggling between the map and list views.
Previous Experience
The previous search experience is limited to searching for a club by typing in its City, State, or Zip-code. A user basically needs to have a predetermined club that they want to search for, giving little flexibility for them to truly “search” for the best club for them.
The Solution
List View - Consistent with current experience, but with added Filter and Map buttons
Map View - Use Mapbox to bring in customizable map. Users can interact with map component to search by exact location and easily find clubs.
Amenity Filtering - Filters overlay to select, reset, or search filtered clubs.
Filtered Map View - Indicators in both the list and popup to show activated filters.
Testing
Our team tested the designs at various stages of the design process
Lo-fi Designs - Tested with a few usability participants early on to get feedback on functionality, feasibility, and content.
MVP - Ran A/B tests to validate solutions compared to the previous experience.
Shipped - We fully shipped the new experience after positive test metrics. The experience is still live on the Equinox website to this day.
Learnings
Components. Everywhere. Creating components for everything, whether a simple button or an entire page, not only helped my design process but also made it easier for developers to follow along. Cleaning older components on the site also helped make the site more cohesive.
Constant 1 on 1s. Throughout the process, I met with my project manager as well as the developers often. Nearly every other day. This not only helped us grow closer as a team but also have full visibility on all of our work flows.
Improving my research skills. Early in the process, I worked closely with our UX Researcher to set a solid foundation and get qualitative data from users. We utilized UserTesting to come up with unique methods including tasking participants to score their experience and feelings towards the club-searching experience.