[withinboredom]

I used to work in the fitness industry, and we built apps for some big players (not PureGym, though they were a customer for other parts of our stuff). Anyway, we'd often sit in meetings with them to discuss new features. One time, we discussed adding notifications. They got hung up on this -- there were about 8 different departments -- and they decided to add a notification to ask how clean the gym was... because it was "safe". These people, in general, are terrified of scaring away members by bothering them about anything.

But yeah, we cared deeply about the UX/UI, but these things are built by committee and the committee is pretty dumb, very political, and non-technical.

[ndriscoll]

The amazing part of that story is that they had the correct concern, but decided to bother people with something stupid anyway. That's like getting a notification asking how the weather is. Things like that are exactly why I said elsewhere a gym app would be a hard no from me.

Your story makes it sound like somehow the meeting was "let's add notifications, but for what?" and landed on that, which is exactly the type of thing that will lead to massively annoying people. If they don't have an obvious customer need for notifications (clearly they don't), why have them?

[withinboredom]

The original idea was to add notifications about classes... like if you scheduled a class, to be notified if it was canceled or modified. They felt like they would rather have people be in the gym for a canceled class than to not show up at all.

[cedws]

Thanks for the insight.