Kinis App

Kinis is a minimalist footwear company with grand aspirations. The mission:

In an effort to expand this movement beyond apparel, Kinis approached me to help design a brand new fitness & wellness platform focused on helping clients achieve their health goals and on helping coaches build & manage their business.

The Kinis app is currently in development, expected to release later this year.

What is it?

At its core, the Kinis app is a platform for connecting fitness & wellness coaches with clients. It’s chock-full of features that help coaches manage their small businesses, from scheduling to invoices. Clients make use of a robust search feature to find coaches they’d like to work with, along with local events related to their interests.

Core Features

The four main tabs of the app contain everything a coach or client needs to build their business or improve their wellness.

Onboarding

Registration and personalization are handled through a series of onboarding pages where the user sets up their profile and adds information. Users can skip through this process if desired and add information later on.

Trust and authenticity are incredibly important to the foundation of this platform; we never want our client users to worry about whether they’ve booked a phony. The Kinis team manages a robust certification process on the back-end for coaches and centers in order to maintain this high level of trust for our users.

Search & Filter

The search & filter functions are housed in the Discover tab. Upon entering the tab, users are greeted with three relevant categories to browse through based on their profile information. Tapping the search bar will bring up recent searches as well as search suggestions. Entering three or more characters into the input brings up a focused search mode. The Discover tab also has a powerful filter system, allowing users to narrow their query based on criteria such as rating, type, and location.

User Experience

We began this project not with screens and artboards, but with a group of personal trainers, coaches, and fitness enthusiasts. Before we knew what we were going to build, we asked these folks what they were missing in their day-to-day fitness & wellness journeys. Many of them were stuck with a disparate amalgam of technologies, from the analog pen & paper, to Google Calendar, to invoicing software, and paying out of pocket for certain services. Our product vision arose from these early conversations, along with a robust industry analysis ensuring a market opportunity.

Our user experience has always, appropriately, been guided by our users. It is extremely beneficial to be able to bounce ideas and prototypes off of the actual end-users of the product. After we identified the core features of the app (onboarding, profile, discover, schedule, book, review, invoice), we were able to outline user flows and process patterns, and even begin to brainstorm a milestone map for the actual build.

Project Leadership

In June of 2020, Kinis reached out to me asking if I would lead the design of their wellness platform (which, at that point, was just a sparkle in the eye). I was fortunate enough to have worked with Kinis back in 2017 when they were just getting the company off the ground, collaborating closely with the CEO to develop their logo, brand book, style guide, and website design.

In addition to, of course, designing the application, I have taken on a great deal of responsibility for its overall development. Some of the work includes: designing a flexible UI kit in Figma; setting up and managing our JIRA board, writing tickets, and defining development milestones; owning our product hub in Notion; directing the dev team and responding to tech queries. Although I am exposed to many of these responsibilities in my day job at a software agency, this was my first time leading a team and delegating to those under me. I count it as one of my most important and influential projects to date.

Coming Soon!

The Kinis app will be available for download on both iOS and Android later this year. I can't wait for you to try it out. Thanks for reading!