Innovation in Game-Based Fitness: Catching up with Jordan Morris

At Ergatta, design is at the forefront of everything we do. When our three co-founders first came up with the concept for Ergatta, they made the decision early on to adopt a premium aesthetic, both from a software and a hardware perspective. It was only fitting that Ergatta’s very first hire was our Director of Product Design, Jordan Morris.

It’s impossible to quantify or summarize the impact that Jordan’s work has had on the Ergatta experience, and his work continues to fuel the continuous innovation of our game-based fitness platform. We caught up with Jordan this week to ask: how do you approach designing something from the ground up? As Ergatta has evolved, what are some of the best practices you've learned regarding innovative design?

From Jordan Morris (Director of Product Design, Ergatta):?

From the very beginning, we’ve put a premium on high-quality design at Ergatta, from the function to the look and feel of our experiences.

We lean into UX fundamentals that revolve around our users because personal fitness is just that: personal. Everyone has a unique approach toward their fitness regimen, so it’s incumbent on us to understand what our customers care about if we want to design something that is genuinely impactful. What are their goals? What helps or prevents them from establishing and maintaining strong fitness habits? What do they say versus what they do? Having a clear sense of our users’ perspectives and behaviors informs how our software should flow and feel, what we should highlight or minimize in its design.

Among our community, we leverage direct communication and hands-on work with Ergatta members in user interviews, surveys, and remote usability tests to see how our designs perform. More indirectly, to get a more dispassionate view on a newly-designed feature or game, we might perform A/B tests or unmoderated usability tests with follow-up questions.

Internally, we’re big on creating the space for those similarly unique perspectives to be voiced among our team in user diaries, creative workshops, and open-ended brainstorming sessions. All of that combines to paint us a comprehensive picture about which designs we should pursue and why. It’s never perfect, and sometimes we still miss, but those misses are—excitingly—often revelatory in helping us to understand how we can better serve people on their fitness journeys.

Yet when we’re charting new territory, it’s key for us to be flexible about how much research we need to do, and when we need to do it. We can’t innovate if we’re not delivering new features, so we have to be surgical about when we’ll invest more or less in user research. In instances where we want to move more quickly, we’ll lean into our already-learned insights, make educated guesses, and simply spot-check with users to ensure we’re not making any huge missteps before marching forward with a concept.