SPLT

The initial brief focused on commerce: products, orders, stock, promo codes and payouts for admins and vendors, with loyalty points and subscriptions on the shop side. It was built around selling; trainers and members didn’t yet have a role of their own.

The development estimate the client had been given didn’t hold up line by line, and product strategy and design hadn’t been scoped at all.

I proposed splitting the work into stages: strategy, feature definition and UX/UI design first, development once the product was defined. The client agreed, and I led the product direction with two designers.

Before drawing wireframes, we subscribed to the major fitness apps and their betas and reviewed their features alongside user feedback.

One gap kept appearing: trainers were treated like ordinary members, with little chance to establish their professional credibility or earn through the platform.

That changed the direction of the product. Rather than treat the marketplace as a shop with a social feed attached, I developed a training layer around the relationship between coaches and members.

We expanded the scope to include a comprehensive community and workout architecture, shifting the business model from a transactional shop to a trainer-driven platform.

Trainers became a role of their own. Their profiles led with their track record and subscription plans. Free content let members judge a coach before paid videos unlocked the rest, and monthly, quarterly and yearly plans were proposed as a new recurring revenue line.

A dedicated trainer dashboard handled clients, goals, workout plans, an exercise library and video content, while vendor and admin dashboards ran the operational side of the marketplace.

The challenge was to give each role the right experience without building four disconnected products.

I set the information architecture and the visual direction, then worked with a senior and a junior designer to build the screens and the shared system. Multi-role admin systems were new territory for the team, so we mapped the user journeys and the logic behind each role together before building the full UI.

The trainer and admin dashboards each had their own navigation, and all three shared one shell, one set of tables and one set of reporting patterns. The mobile app and the dashboards used the same visual language.