Platform manager
The platform manager can review, approve, and decline trainers’ documents.
Your Living-room Trainer
A fitness marketplace that connects trainers and trainees to exercise at home via video sessions
Idea
Kathryn Tracy, the founder of Your Living-room Trainer, or Y.L.T., asked SteelKiwi to build an online personal training platform. Y.L.T. connects trainers and trainees, giving a space for trainers to offer one-on-one coaching via video chat and trainees to exercise at home. In addition to reducing the stress of going to a gym and promoting a healthy lifestyle, Your Living-room Trainer offers many people a great freelance job opportunity.
Our task was to design and develop a stable minimum viable product (MVP) for Y.L.T. This would minimize time to market and allow our client to further improve the product based on user feedback.
Analysis
Physical activity and exercise are known to reduce stress. But there’s also a reverse correlation. Studies show that stress has negative effects on quality of exercise. When under stress, people are more likely to make poor dietary and leisure choices. This may cause a guilt-based downward spiral, leading to more and more poor choices along the way.
These findings point to a need for services that allow people to exercise when and where it’s comfortable for them. Y.L.T. offers the stress-reducing benefits of exercise and helps users stay fit and healthy from the comfort of their homes.
User Roles
Trainer
Trainers can create public profiles, attach diplomas and certificates, and get reviews from clients. Trainers can hold video sessions and chat with trainees. They can also get notifications about booked or shifted appointments.
Trainee
Trainees can create profiles, add their health information, have video sessions, text trainers, and leave reviews.
Results
Duration:
May 12, 2017 – November 28, 2017
Team:
Backend - 2 Frontend - 2 UI/UX - 1 DevOps - 2 QA - 1
Designed the UI/UX
Our main goal was to find a balance between the UI and UX that makes Y.L.T. both comfortable and attractive.
To create a comfortable experience, we estimated what paths users would take in the app, then mapped them out as wireframes. This helped us to achieve a stable architecture that could be improved according to Kathryn’s desires.
Y.L.T. helps users be fit and healthy easily and comfortably, and we wanted to translate that ease and comfort to the user interface. We achieved this by analyzing Kathryn’s ideas and understanding what would be enjoyable to the Y.L.T. target audience in terms of design and experience.
Defined the web architecture
We developed Your Living-room Trainer in Python 3.6 and based it on the Django framework. These technologies are responsible for rendering the website and displaying the administrative interface.
We used Celery for event scheduling (session starts, email notification timing, etc.). RabbitMQ serves as a broker for Celery.
A PostgreSQL database stores information and uses Full Text Search to search for trainers.
To establish proper client-server interactions, we developed a WebSocket with AioHTTP that manages all session terminations.
Added integrations
We used Twilio Video to implement video chat. Google ReCaptcha adds additional security.
For payment processing, we integrated Stripe Connect. It allows trainees to pay for sessions and trainers to withdraw money from their accounts.
We also integrated Google Analytics to simplify and improve website marketing and management.
Implemented features
Trainers must prove their credentials by attaching diplomas, certificates, certifications, or other documents to the registration form. Trainer applications are then manually reviewed and approved by Y.L.T. administrators. This way, trainees don’t need to worry about the quality of their trainer’s services.
Trainees are required to answer questions about health and lifestyle. This helps trainers make proper choices about exercise programs and lifestyle recommendations.
After each training session, trainees are asked to review their experience. This helps to moderate the performance of trainers and improve trust in the platform.
Our team was very meticulous when creating the welcome wizards. For trainers, we minimized account setup time so they can start looking for trainees right after registration. For trainees, we used wizards that request a lot of health-related data to simplify finding classes and trainers.
Trainers and trainees can schedule classes whenever it’s most comfortable. Flexible scheduling helps people integrate exercise into their lives as opposed to having to shape their lives around exercise.
Trainers and trainees can communicate via text chat and video chat. Text is mostly used to discuss session details and video to hold actual classes. Each video chat has a one-hour time limit. Participants can spend less time than that, but they cannot exceed it.
Your Living-room Trainer alerts users about important events. Users can set the types of alerts they want to receive. Default alerts include chat messages, class cancellations, and upcoming classes.
Trainees don’t pay platform fees, which are covered by trainers. Trainees pay only for the classes they take, i.e. for their trainer’s time.
Technology Stack
Client's feedback
Their communication was very impressive, and they worked very well as a team.
Kathryn Tracy, Founder of Your Living-room Trainer
