Fitness Passport — Mobile App Redesign

Role: Product & UX Design Lead (First in-house designer) Timeline: February 2025 – Present Platform: iOS & Android (React Native) Team: Built and led a team of 4 product designers

Situation

Fitness Passport is an Australian employee-benefit program that gives members and their families affordable, unlimited access to over 2,000 gyms, pools and fitness facilities across Australia and New Zealand. Founded in 2005, the company had grown largely through operational grit and facility partnerships — but its digital experience hadn't kept pace.

When I joined as the organisation's first dedicated Product/UX Designer, the mobile app was the primary touchpoint for 195,000 monthly active users who relied on it to check in at facilities and manage their memberships. The state of that experience was concerning:

A legacy codebase and patchwork UI. The existing app (v1.8.x) had been built and iterated on by various external vendors and consultants, resulting in a fragmented, inconsistent look and feel that was difficult to maintain and scale. There was no design system, no component library and no established design process.
Low perceived quality. Members described the app as "clunky" and "frustrating" in app store reviews. Some were actively requesting a return to physical membership passes — a high-cost option the business wanted to retire. The app store rating was poor and trending flat.
Check-in friction. The core job of the app — scanning a QR code at a facility's front desk — was unreliable. QR codes often failed, multi-factor authentication interrupted the flow every session, and checking in family members was cumbersome. Front-desk staff at facilities found it hard to visually confirm a successful check-in during busy periods.
Weak facility search. Members couldn't search by postcode, filter by activity type or easily compare facilities. The map was sluggish and the data behind it was thin — no opening hours, no age restrictions, no accessibility info. Annual survey results singled out "inconvenient location or schedule" and search frustrations as top reasons members stopped visiting.
Limited digital penetration. Only 44% of total members were monthly active users of the app, and the daily-to-monthly active user ratio sat at 17% — a signal that most members opened the app only when they absolutely had to, not because they wanted to.
No design capability internally. The business had approached design through external engagements and ad-hoc consultant work. There were no established user research practices, no UX metrics, and no internal design team. Leadership had articulated a desire for "modern, sleek and minimal design that competes with other health and fitness apps" as part of a broader Full Potential Plan (FPP), but the organisational muscle to deliver on that ambition didn't yet exist.

Task

My brief was broad, and deliberately so. As the founding designer reporting to the Head of Product and Technology, I was responsible for:

Leading the UX redesign of the mobile app from v1.8.x to a complete rewrite (v2.0.0 and beyond), with immediate priorities around check-in, facility search and navigation — the three experiences that touched every member, every visit.
Establishing the product design function from scratch — hiring designers, introducing user research, defining UX metrics and standing up a design system that engineering could actually use.
Improving the app store rating by 30% and growing digital penetration and engagement — measurable targets set with leadership as part of FPP Pillar 1: "Uplift UX."

The constraints were real. Engineering was a small cross-platform team using React Native with a single codebase for iOS and Android. Any UI decisions had to work across both platforms without ballooning effort. Budget for research tooling and incentives was tight. And the app couldn't go dark during the rewrite — hundreds of thousands of members depended on it daily to access their gyms.

Action

1. Understanding the landscape

My first weeks were spent absorbing context: pairing with engineers who'd built the frontend, speaking with the customer care team lead about the feedback they fielded daily, reviewing app store reviews, and getting access to a live membership so I could experience the check-in flow first-hand at facilities across Melbourne. I documented the existing screen flows, mapped the pain points against annual survey data, and started building a picture of what "good" looked like for a utility app in the health and fitness space — benchmarking against ClassPass, Google Maps and gym-specific apps.

I also conducted a heuristic evaluation of the legacy app, which surfaced redundant navigation items, inconsistent interaction patterns and multiple dead-end states in the check-in flow that were directly contributing to support tickets and negative reviews.

2. Choosing a UI foundation

Rather than building a bespoke component library from scratch (which we didn't have the resources for), I proposed adopting an off-the-shelf library and theming it to Fitness Passport's brand. I evaluated six options — AWS Amplify UI, MUI, TailwindUI, NativeWind, NextUI and shadcn/ui — scoring each against criteria the engineering lead and I agreed on: cost, coverage of basic components, customisability, theming capability, learnability and accessibility compliance.

We landed on a Tailwind-based approach using NativeWind for mobile, which gave us the most flexibility to bring our own theme while staying unopinionated enough to avoid fighting the framework. The principle was atomic design: atoms and molecules from off-the-shelf, organisms we'd build ourselves.

3. Redesigning navigation and information architecture

The v1.8.x app had redundant tasks in both the bottom navigation and home screen, and members were confused about where to access top tasks — particularly switching between QR check-in and barcode check-in. I redesigned the information hierarchy with a clear set of principles:

Only top tasks earn main navigation presence. Every new feature would be ruthlessly evaluated before getting a spot.
Check-in is the hero. The home screen would surface the check-in button prominently — no more hunting through tabs.
Facilities search gets a dedicated tab in the centre of the navigation, reflecting its role as the second most common job.

I proposed a structure that consolidated the experience into four clear areas: Home (with check-in front and centre), Facilities (search and discovery), Activity (visit history and content), and Profile (membership details and settings).

4. Redesigning the check-in experience

Check-in was the make-or-break moment. I designed a flow where:

QR scanning launched directly from the home screen with a single tap, camera permissions handled gracefully on first use.
Barcode display for turnstile facilities was accessible from the same check-in screen, clearly labelled for "scanner" vs "reception" contexts.
Family member switching used a horizontal carousel that all test participants understood intuitively, navigated by swiping.
MFA was deferred — the app would no longer prompt for multi-factor authentication on every session, dramatically reducing friction for the most common task.

I also explored forward-looking check-in alternatives: Apple/Google Wallet passes, NFC tap-to-check-in for smartwatch users, and deep-link shortcuts for one-tap access from the lock screen — addressing recurring requests in app store reviews and user interviews.

5. Running usability testing

I set up testing through Maze for the navigation and check-in flows, recruiting 7 participants across our member base. The testing covered two primary scenarios:

QR check-in: "You've walked into a gym, there is a sign on the reception desk for Fitness Passport Members. How would you enter the gym?"
Barcode check-in: "You and your child have come to the pool together. There is a turnstile with a scanner — how would you enter the facility?"

Results guided concrete design decisions. When 5 of 7 users navigated to the barcode via the QR scanner page (missing the direct barcode button), I consolidated the check-in screen to show both methods together with clear contextual labels, reducing cognitive load.

6. Improving facility search

Working from an initiative brief I co-authored with the Product Manager, I redesigned facility search to:

Support search by postcode, suburb and region (the legacy app couldn't even handle a 4-digit postcode like "3135")
Allow toggling between map and list view without clearing the search
Enable multi-activity filtering (members could now search for gyms with both a pool and group fitness)
Display the user's current location with a one-tap reset

The longer-term search vision included enriching facility data with opening hours, minimum age restrictions, parking and accessibility information — data that needed to be captured operationally before it could surface in the UI.

7. Building the design team and capability

In parallel with shipping product, I hired and onboarded designers across the Members, Facilities and Employers squads, growing the team from 1 to 4:

A Product Designer for the Employers squad
A Senior Product Designer for the Facilities squad
A Product Designer for the Members squad, who I mentored into owning the check-in and content UI work

As the team scaled further, I recruited a Senior Product Designer to strengthen the Facilities experience work.

Beyond hiring, I stood up the practices that make a design team effective:

UX metrics framework: Introduced SEQ (Single Ease Question) for task-level measurement, UX-Lite for broader experience tracking, and PURE (Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts) for pre-ship design quality assessment. Baselined SEQ at 5–6 out of 7 and set targets for improvement.
User research operations: Established interview recording workflows, research repositories in Confluence, and a process for scheduling participant sessions with gift card incentives.
Design system governance: Began formalising a shared design system with design tokens, charting guidelines and component documentation — bridging the gap between Figma and the React Native codebase.
Design progression framework: Created a career ladder from Associate Product Designer through to Product Design Manager, giving the team clarity on growth.

8. Managing the phased rollout

The v2.0.0 release was rolled out carefully to minimise disruption:

Android first, then iOS, on a percentage-based randomised rollout starting in New Zealand
Employer-facing FAQs and support documentation prepared in advance
Release notes and support channel communication coordinated with the customer care team
Forced upgrade strategy planned for when adoption reached sufficient levels, with the legacy v1.8.x app eventually decommissioned

Result

Quantitative outcomes

App store rating improving — a steady upward trend following the v2.0.0 launch, with negative reviews about basic usability issues declining. The 30% improvement target was set as a north-star metric and tracked through ongoing releases.
Mobile app usage improving — digital penetration and engagement metrics showed growth as members found the app more useful beyond just check-in.
100% task completion rate on QR check-in in usability testing, with an average ease-of-use score of 6.57 out of 7.
100% task completion on barcode check-in, with 5.43 out of 7 ease-of-use — a score that directly informed the consolidated check-in screen redesign.
500,000+ barcode check-ins recorded from the top 3 barcode facilities alone in a 12-month period, validating that both check-in methods needed first-class treatment.
Multiple successful releases shipped: v2.0.0 through v2.0.5, and eventually v3.5.0 — each incrementally improving the experience with features like Apple Maps integration (iOS), audio content support, and photo upload improvements.

Qualitative and strategic outcomes

Design team scaled from 1 to 4 product designers in under 18 months, with each designer embedded in a cross-functional squad and contributing to both product delivery and research.
UX practices established from zero. The team now runs usability testing, tracks SEQ and UX-Lite scores, conducts user interviews, and uses a 30:60:90 design review process before shipping.
Design system in progress — a shared Figma library and Tailwind-based component foundation that enables faster, more consistent feature delivery across squads.
Singapore expansion supported — the design foundations (localisation-ready components, configurable address fields, timezone-aware UI) enabled the team to support Fitness Passport's international growth with confidence.
Forward-looking innovation seeded — NFC wallet check-in, AI coaching discovery, wellness content integration and gamification concepts (the "Fipa" digital pass mascot) all originated from design-led exploration and are feeding the product roadmap.

Reflection

The biggest lesson from this project is that establishing design capability is itself a design problem. The mobile app redesign was the visible output, but the harder work was building the system around it — the team, the processes, the metrics, the cross-functional trust — that would let good design happen consistently and at scale. In a business where design had historically been outsourced and reactive, the shift to an embedded, research-informed, metrics-driven practice was as transformative as any screen redesign.

The other lesson is about respecting constraints. We didn't have the luxury of a big-bang redesign with months of upfront research. We shipped iteratively, tested in production, and used each release as a learning loop. The v2.0.0 launch wasn't perfect — the transition from v1.8.6 without sufficient usability testing left some navigation confusion that we had to fix in subsequent releases. That experience reinforced why the design process matters, and gave me the evidence to advocate for testing before shipping, not after.