Tabatwo

Defining the core UX of a social fitness platform Tabatwo

Role: UX Consultant
Timeline: October 2025 – December 2025

Overview

Tabatwo is a social fitness platform designed to help people train together either through live instructor-led sessions or shared workouts with friends. I joined the team during a critical phase of product development, where core features were being defined and validated ahead of wider rollout.

My role was to lead user-centred design across key product areas, ensuring that foundational concepts were clear, usable, and aligned with both user needs and technical constraints. I drove UX work from discovery through validation, working closely with product and engineering to support fast, informed decision-making.

The challenge

At the time, Tabatwo offered a broad range of functionality — onboarding, workouts, instructors, scheduling, and social features — but the experience lacked a clear centre of gravity.

Key challenges included:

• Users struggling to understand the app’s core value proposition early on

• High-friction flows around booking sessions and starting workouts

• Social features feeling disconnected from the main experience

• Complexity and inconsistency across navigation and language

• Early technical issues impacting trust and motivation

The challenge was not just to improve individual screens, but to help the team clarify what the product was really about, and design around that focus.

My role & responsibilities

As UX Consultant, I was responsible for:

• Leading design of core product features, including:

  • Social workout experiences

  • Custom sessions and workout playback

  • Instructor booking and scheduling

• Defining user flows and functional requirements before visual design

• Planning and moderating usability testing with end users

• Synthesising insights into clear, prioritised recommendations

• Collaborating closely with product and engineering to ensure feasibility and alignment

• Supporting faster, more confident delivery in a fast-moving environment

Approach

I led a structured, end-to-end UX process that balanced discovery, validation, and delivery.

1. Discovery & flow definition

Before moving into visual execution, I mapped key user journeys and identified high-value actions particularly around onboarding, booking, and starting a workout. This helped surface complexity early and aligned the team around what needed to be tested.

2. Usability testing

I planned and moderated task-based usability testing with five users aged 21–68. Sessions focused on first-time experience and core flows, including:

• Onboarding and app clarity

• Home screen and navigation

• Custom workout creation and playback

• Instructor booking and calendar use

• Friends and social features

Sessions were moderated, think-aloud, and ran for 60–90 minutes, allowing for both behavioural insights and qualitative feedback.

3. Synthesis & prioritisation

Findings were synthesised into clear themes and prioritised based on impact, frequency, and risk. Rather than producing a long list of issues, I focused on helping the team understand what to fix first, especially where friction affected trust, motivation, or revenue-related actions.

Key insights

Some of the most impactful insights included:

• Early confusion reduced trust: Users were excited by the idea of training with friends, but struggled to understand the app’s purpose within the first minutes of use.

• Too many steps killed momentum: High-value actions like booking an instructor or starting a workout required too many decisions and screens.

• Social was under-leveraged: Social features were central to the brand promise, but felt secondary or hidden in the experience.

• Workout execution mattered most: Playback issues, unclear controls, and lack of guidance during workouts caused frustration and demotivation.

• Clarity beats flexibility: Users preferred clear guidance and defaults over extensive configuration, especially early on.

Design recommendations & impact

Based on testing and analysis, I helped the team align around several key priorities:

• Clarify the main offering
  Focus on a single primary value proposition (training with friends or instructors) and perfect that core flow before expanding.

• Simplify onboarding and entry points
  Guide first-time users toward a clear first action, reducing cognitive load and building early confidence.

• Streamline booking flows
  Reduce instructor booking to a small number of clear steps, with time and price surfaced early.

• Improve workout session UX
  Address technical reliability, clarify play/pause behaviour, and add clearer distinctions between work and rest states.

• Integrate social features meaningfully
  Bring friends and shared workouts into core journeys rather than isolating them in separate sections.

These recommendations helped the team make more focused product decisions and laid a stronger UX foundation for future development.

Outcomes

While not all changes were shipped within the project timeframe, the work contributed to:

• Clearer product direction during a pivotal development phase

• Better alignment between design, product, and engineering

• Reduced ambiguity around core user journeys

• A shared understanding of what success should look like from a user perspective

Reflections

This project reinforced the importance of:

• Using research to create focus, not just find problems

• Prioritising clarity and momentum over feature breadth

• Embedding a product’s value proposition directly into the UX

• Acting as a facilitator and strategic partner, not just a designer