UX Designer + UI Developer. 2019-2020. Led the creation of program and workout builder features.

The Challenge

Coaches managing clients’ training plans faced fragmented workflows, juggling calendars, notes, and third-party apps like Google Calendar. This resulted in inefficiencies, redundancies, and challenges in keeping clients accountable. We sought to answer:

How might we...build a unified platform that allows coaches to plan, manage, and organize their clients’ training plans and schedules in one place?

The Outcome

We designed and developed a custom calendar system and modular workout builder that became the core of Coach Catalyst’s platform. Coaches could now create reusable programs, tailor plans for individual clients, and track progress in real time. Early adopters praised the system’s ease of use, with one coach noting, “This finally replaces the five apps I was using to manage my clients.”

The Context

When I joined the project, coaches relied on manual processes: rebuilding workouts for each client, copy-pasting calendar events, and struggling to track adherence. Clients, meanwhile, lacked visibility into their plans, leading to missed sessions and communication gaps. Our goal was to centralize coaching workflows by integrating a dynamic calendar and a library of reusable training components, reducing administrative work and improving client accountability.

Understanding Our Users

Through interviews with the existing user base, we identified the key personas who would rely on, use, and drive value from these new feature additions to the platform.

Coaches

Nutritionists, trainers, and life coaches. Overwhelmed by managing 20+ clients across disparate tools. They needed a way to create repeatable programs while retaining flexibility to customize for individual clients.

Clients

Busy professionals and fitness enthusiasts. Often frustrated by juggling multiple apps to view plans, log progress, and communicate. They wanted clear, centralized access to their schedules and workouts.

Redefining the Platform

To kick things off, with the founder and lead developer we established core design principles:

• Reusable & Flexible: Enable coaches to build modular programs and workouts while allowing customization.
• Intuitive: Reduce the learning curve with intuitive interactions.
• Responsive: Ensure real-time updates across devices for coaches and clients.

Key Areas We Tackled

Coaches needed both high-level planning (e.g., a monthly calendar view) and detailed daily adjustments, providing multiple ways to manage a client’s journey.

Calendar View

A familiar calendar view that allows coaches. We wanted to have this available to better align with the concept of weeks and months time frame of typical programs.

List View

A stacked list view into a program. This view allows coaches to more easily scan and compare lessons, messages, and actions across days.

Creating a Tiered Workout Builder

Coaches lacked a way to build and maintain exercises for their clients. They often had to use other workout applications to give to their clients. Essentially, not keeping them within our platform, and introducing friction to their client’s workflows. To address this, we introduced a key feature: a workout builder, as part of the new program functionality.

Within this structure, we introduced a three-tier system that allow for modularity, reusability, and repeatability. This ensures that users can create modular components and reuse them across programs of any size and duration.

Exercises

Single individual workouts containing the work to do, video examples, and rep and set details.

Blocks

These are individual reusable groups of exercises. This also could contain “circuits”, repeatable sections within a block.

Workouts

Full routines built from blocks (e.g., “HIIT Session”: Warm-Up + 3x Strength Blocks). Each tier could be saved to a library, edited on the fly, or shared across clients.

Building Workout Interactions

One key thing we took away from our coach interviews and testing was that clicking was not great. Especially when you had to click to move exercises in and out, and blocks up and down. To create a more seamless experience, we implemented a drag-and-drop interaction pattern as the primary method. This allowed coaches to assemble workouts in seconds.

The Client Experience

Both of these features also had to be exposed to the clients as well. The clients could access their journey view through the web, or through the mobile experience.

Web Experience

A user’s journey through the web experience in a browser.

Mobile Experience

A user's journey on the iOS / Android. They can managing their workouts, messages, and actions on the go.

Key Learnings

• User Trust is Everything: Coaches deeply understood their clients’ needs. By involving them early, we avoided over-engineering and focused on features that mattered and how to best create interactions that worked best (drag and drop vs. button clicks).
• Balance Flexibility with Simplicity: While the tiered workout system was powerful, some coaches initially found it overwhelming. We introduced onboarding tooltips to ease adoption.
• Tech Choices Shape UX: The reactivity of Vue.js transformed complex interactions (e.g., reordering blocks) into seamless experiences for our users.

By centering coaches’ workflows and designing for reusability, we transformed Coach Catalyst into a mission-critical tool for trainers—proving that the right platform can turn administrative chaos into streamlined success.