Turning a 6-week project into a year-long innovation partnership

Blink Fitness hired Fuzz to reimagine their member experience. What started as a 6-week engagement became a year-long collaboration that positioned both companies as leaders in connected fitness.

Blink needed to differentiate in the crowded budget fitness market and improve operational efficiency at their growing chain of locations.

My role

Led experience design strategy and execution. Built Fuzz’s experience design practice while delivering two major innovations for Blink.

With Blink I accomplished three things for Fuzz:

• Built the experience design practice into an integral part of the company
• Position Fuzz as an innovator in the connected experience space 
• Setup a process for research, design and development to innovate and work effectively.

Below I share an overview of two key projects I led for Blink  

Project 1: Activated gym experiences

The goal: Create connected in-gym experiences that would position Blink as an innovation leader.

Achievements: 

• Live working demo in 6 weeks at Fuzz’s model fitness center “Blink Roebling Street”
• A roadmap that prioritized features by its impact on users, business and tech feasibility. 
• Launch the first feature at Blink Fitness Grand Central location

A new Front Desk experience

The goal was to increase the number of joins. We aimed to improve the experience of members and employees at the entrance. This involved reimagining the front desk interactions. 

Achievements: 

• A fully developed demo in 6 months of a new experience in the front desk loved by members and employees. 
• Working demo performed better in all the established benchmarks
• Membership sign-up time was 3 minutes faster, checking into the gym took half the time, making a retail purchase was also reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute. We were able to reduce devices from 20 to 8 with the new ecosystem, and staff did not require any training to use the experience.

We pressure tested our design of a new front desk experience for a major gym chain in our lab environment. This involved running realistic ‘peak-time’ scenarios. Over 40 research participants entered the front desk area to carry out an array of tasks. We identified key operational and customer pain-points through this effort, which we solved in later iterations.

“I was very impressed that Sandra was able to jump quickly onto the Blink Activated Experiences project and ‘right the ship’ as it were on a project that was very tricky. In general, I am impressed by how she mentors other members of the team and pushes them to do their best as well. She is great to work with, super sharp and super communicative. She’s been an asset on Blink.”

Product Manager at Fuzz