Turning four tabs into a daily plan.

Most fitness apps are built as feature collections: a workout tab, a nutrition tab, a check-in tab, a progress tab. Trainest was too. Members opened the app and didn’t know what to do. They bounced between sections, missed steps, and eventually stopped opening the app. The features existed, but the guidance didn’t.

The product team, the founder included, had a conviction: the app should answer one question: “What do I need to do today?” Not which tab to open. Not how to configure a macro split. Just: here’s your plan, check it off, watch your progress build.

I led product design for the iOS member app and the trainer web platform, and prototyped the key interactions in code so the developers could feel the exact details: checklist animations, photo card transitions, Action Score celebrations, the shift from one emotional state to the next.

Trainest was a startup, so every design decision was also a business decision, and the runway was short. Our lead developer argued for simplicity: “simple scales, fancy fails.” One clear offer, he said, would earn more trust than a confusing array of choices. The business needed the product to prove its value quickly.

My job was to find the design that did both. Today’s Plan became the answer because a single, compelling daily experience was both the best experience and the strongest conversion argument. Members who complete four daily actions don’t need to be sold on the product. They’ve already felt the value.

We deferred social community features, custom ML-driven plans and advanced analytics to focus the first release on one hypothesis: if we simplify the day to a checklist with a score, will people stay?

The tab architecture kept workouts, nutrition and check-ins in silos, and earlier mockups of a unified dashboard hadn’t clicked. “This is the wrong version, because we had a version with it in the middle” was a recurring line in our working sessions. We worked through several concepts:

1. Option A: assessment-first onboarding

   Assessment questions before account creation, then a paywall or tour after signup, with each feature onboarding itself. Familiar, and close to what competitors did.

2. Option B: the fitness plan as a centre tab

   Dereck’s vision: position the app as a ‘personal fitness plan’, with a tab for ‘Your Trainer’s Fitness Plan’ (today’s workout, check-in, adherence ring). Closer, but still organised around the app rather than the member.

3. The reframe

   We stopped asking ‘how do we organise features?’ and started asking ‘what does the member need to do today?’ That question collapsed four tabs into one daily checklist. The home screen is the plan. Not a hub to navigate from. The thing itself.

Today’s Plan puts the workout, nutrition target, weight check-in and progress photo on one screen, each with a clear action and its context (Track meals to hit 3,489 cal). Members don’t choose where to start; the plan tells them. A day counter (Day 65, Day 86…) and the active days along the bottom keep the run of consistency in view.

Today’s Plan only works if trainers can build and manage those plans efficiently. The plan isn’t generic: a trainer builds a programme (Upper Body Sculpting, 35 exercises, 37 mins) and the member just sees ‘Today’s Priority’. The thinking is done for them.

So I designed the trainer platform as the engine of the member’s day, not a separate product. Every trainer decision had to land correctly on the member’s phone, which made every wireframe session a systems architecture discussion too.

The plan gives members something to do. These are the mechanisms that bring them back to do it.

Two states, one reward loop. The dashboard moves from ‘0/4 actions: let’s make today count’ to ‘4/4 actions: Great work!’. The shift between them is the reward.

The Action Score, not a streak. Streaks are fragile: miss one day and the motivation collapses. The Action Score always grows when you show up and gently penalises inaction, so it rewards consistency without punishing life getting in the way.

Over time the Action Score page becomes a complete record of someone’s fitness journey: the total, this week’s points, and every action by day, missed days included.

Photos as the immediate reward. Every completed action can carry a photo, and it comes straight back as a highlight card on Today’s Plan, with the stats laid over it, right where the work happened. Together they make a timeline of the journey, shareable on social media.

Interaction design

The workout as a story arc, not a form

Overview, exercise-by-exercise guidance, a performance summary, a photo, then a share card. Every workout closes with a shareable moment instead of a submitted form.

Onboarding

A relationship, not a feature set

Onboarding stopped teaching the app and started introducing a coach: ‘Welcome to Premium Coaching: answer a few questions for your coach to create your plan.’ One asks members to learn an app; the other asks them to trust a person.

Data strategy

Real metrics, offered as a benefit

Connecting Apple Health unlocks real calories burned, heart rate and intensity. It’s presented as ‘Reach Your Goals Faster’, benefit first, rather than as a permissions request.

The reviews speak to the product as members live with it: structure, simplicity and accountability.

The hardest product problem isn’t adding features. It’s finding the one view that makes everything else unnecessary. Today’s Plan doesn’t hide the complexity; it resolves it. Workouts, nutrition, check-ins and progress photos all still exist, but members never have to think about where to find them.

A two-sided product has to be designed from both sides at once. Every decision on the trainer platform shaped the member’s day. The best decisions came from understanding how the two connect.