BPay at the Gym For 360 Studio, Barclays Bank

On behalf of Barclays, in collaboration with 360 Studio, and within a team of researchers and designers, I researched and mapped out today's gym experience. We then translated this research into a powerful framework that enabled us to explore and analyse opportunities for Barclays contactless payment technology bPay. It enabled us to propose innovative services while maintaining a strong focus on evidenced customer behaviours. Through interviews and ethnography, we understood and mapped out today's gym experience and the attitudes, expectations, and motivations around it.

Analysing our research, we modelled the gym experience as a journey from Pre-gym to Gym to Post-gym through five behaviours: Learn, Focus, Activity, Reward, Evaluate. This experience model gave us a powerful framework to develop new gym interactions and service concepts using the bPay technology and experimenting with its potential, while considering the needs of both gym members and the gym itself. We delivered business cases and concepts for physical and digital initiatives, which helped our client Barclays to analyse key issues, justify investment, and further explore bPay's market opportunities to their full potential.

Understanding the Gym Experience

We modelled the gym experience as a journey from Pre-gym to Gym to Post-gym through five behaviours: Learn, Focus, Activity, Reward, Evaluate. Along this journey, gym members often condense their expectations into concrete, and measurable actions. They reward themselves for achievements, and try to stay motivated. So part of the blame for not achieving the bigger idea can be passed onto the gym and others involved during the membership timeline. This journey is often shared, and there are three key attitudes we identified in this respect: solo, partner, and group. Gym members adopt these attitudes depending on their expectations and motivations - how the gym is working for them at a specific phase in their membership timeline.

Mapping Alternatives

We designed the new gym interactions and service concepts along two journeys - low fidelity and high fidelity - to mockup what those bPay enabled gym experiences would involve. Throughout the phases of the gym experience we framed the needs of the gym itself and their gym members, and used them as design drivers for the bPay technology.

The Opportunity

We ranked the opportunity areas based on the insights of what a meaningful gym experience could be. Our concepts included: enhanced personalisation of service from trainers, gym challenges and lifestyle rewards, and charitable donations. We provided business cases for both physical and digital initiatives, and helped to justify investment and explore market opportunities for bPay to their full potential.

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