The short version: none of the gym apps I tried fit my life. After five apps, a break from the gym and one dance class, I designed the one I was missing.
How I started at the gym
I've been moving my whole life. As a child I did gymnastics, figure skating and dance, and later I took jazz dance so seriously that I thought about making it my career. Strength training, mostly with my own body weight, was always part of it.
As an adult, I kept going to group classes and dance. I was used to training in a group, and it was easy: someone else decided what we would do. I only really started training at the gym when my husband and my son, a teenager at the time, started training together, and I sometimes joined them. My son got serious about it, and after a year he made me a program. But our goals and our pace were very different, so I went looking for alternatives.
Five apps, none of them right
That's how I found my first gym app. It worked well for a long time, and I liked the feeling that I knew what to do at the gym. Then the problems began. It didn't bend to work trips and changes in my schedule. The workouts grew too long. The same exercises kept coming back, some I didn't want to do at all, and swapping one messed up the plan. The weights went up too fast for a small woman like me.
I started trying other apps and ended up using five side by side. Each had something good, none had it all, and none met my standards as a designer: they were either messy, with features piled on features, or plain ugly, as if designed in Word. In the end, I stopped going to the gym. It no longer felt like an easy, stress-free way to spend my free time.
What a dance class showed me
I had never stopped dancing, and after one class I started to wonder why dancing leaves me feeling so much more accomplished than the gym ever did. After an hour of dancing, I know I've done a full workout. I danced my heart out, and that's enough. At the gym, there's always one more set, the next weight, the next reps, and the workout never feels done. I never felt sure that a gym workout was enough, let alone how all my workouts added up over time.
That became the idea: a gym app where the muscles you train glow on a 3D figure, so you can see when you've done enough. Made for anyone who wants to stay strong without having to know what to do, and for people like me: analytical and goal-driven enough to want to be sure of the results, but without calculating everything by hand or reading all the research on muscle growth, like my son did.
From an idea to a product
I couldn't let the idea go, and luckily, turning ideas into products is what I do for a living. For almost 20 years, I've designed services and digital products, from concepts and service design to UI/UX, strategy, marketing and brands. And as always, when that "this is going to be SOOOO good!" feeling kicks in, you know you're onto something worth all your love and effort, to turn a good idea into a brilliant product. So I started designing the gym app I had been missing.
I started with a quick mockup of the glowing figure, and the idea worked. From there, I designed every screen and the training logic behind them: how Chango picks your exercises, sets and weights based on research on strength training, and how every set you do adds up on your figure. Soon I had a real app on my phone, and then on my family's phones. That's where the real work began.
Tested by very different people
From the first version on, I've tested Chango the way I'd test any product: with real people, at the gym, in their everyday lives. The testers range from family and friends to external testers, and their needs couldn't be more different: someone who trains now and then, an Ironman triathlete, a strong, goal-driven 18-year-old, a woman over 70 who wants to stay strong and able, and a gym-goer who trains regularly and never wants to skip a workout. Men and women, younger and older.
Hearing feedback is easy. Understanding it, turning it into an insight that drives the design, and having the skill and the stamina to iterate until the problem is solved, is the real work. That's how Chango has grown, round after round. Its training logic alone, written out in plain language, now runs to some 1,700 lines, and it has been revised nearly 200 times to reach the perfection we've been aiming for from the beginning.
What came out of it
What came out of it is the gym app I was missing. Chango plans every workout around what your muscles still need this week and how they've recovered, so you never have to wonder what to do. It bends when your week does, with work trips, missed days and all. And after the last set, every muscle you trained lights up on your own 3D figure, to give you the reassurance and feedback you've been longing for: that your whole body has had enough, and varied enough, strength training to keep your strength and wellbeing in good shape.
Chango is packed with smart, insightful features I haven't found in any other gym app. But for me, the point was always simpler: to walk out of the gym with the same feeling I get after a dance class. I did my workout, and it was enough, so I can feel the glow inside and out.
Chango will keep growing the same way it started: by being all ears for the needs of its users, from fellow gym-goers to those still wondering whether the gym is for them. Every idea and every piece of feedback is welcome with open arms 🐵