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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

So why can’t they learn? We have Google, we have Stack Overflow, we have LLMs. My cynical take is that there’s just nobody there who gives a shit about the UX, most likely the team that built all of their backend stuff is long gone (quit or laid off) and now there’s a skeleton team of the cheapest possible engineers just keeping it running.

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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.

Thanks for the insight.

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?

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.

Having engineers specialized in a specific stack learn on the job for the sake of/while working on a project is a great way to end up with really funky code and poor user experiences. I speak as a developer tasked with doing exactly that several times at a previous job, and the long-term is never pretty. The first code you write is immediately legacy code, but if you're learning as you write for a project that is already in motion, you're usually stuck with that legacy code until someone goes out of business or the rapture comes and they have to do a reorg because half the team was hauled to the kingdom of heaven, and now there's an MBA running the department who doesn't like you and wants to leverage AI to do the block chain.

> So why can’t they learn?

Who "they"? The vast majority of companies don't have a staff of programmers. These apps are outsourced to cheap consultancies.

It is a gym app. Realistically as the article says it really doesn't have to change much.

The UX of that app is actually "ok". While it is a wrapper around their mobile site it works well enough.

I’ve used PureGym before, as the author points out the app is terrible, even on a good signal it takes 30s+ to “warm up”, whatever that means. I don’t want the app to “warm up”, I want the QR code right now, I’m left standing outside the gym like an idiot waiting for the bloated app to call a REST endpoint.

I suspect they don’t care. They have “an app”.

It’s probably developed by one or two people, likely not full time, who spend most of their time on it implementing whatever the next special promotion needs, not stuff users want.

Because that’s what they’re told to do with the little time allocated to it.

it's probably a random app development studio. the gym most likely doesn't employ their own app dev employees. the app developement studio basically cares about two things: earning money and keeping their client just happy enough so they come back. the users of the app are not their customers and at best a secondary concern.

I was talking more generally about the general design of the app. It is "ok".

I have a really rubbish signal (I live in the sticks in the North West). There was almost no reception on near the gym. It never took 30 seconds. Generally scanning the QR code itself wouldn't get recognised by the scanner. I just ended up using the 8 digit code. This was using the iPhone app.

I ended up cancelling because quite honestly I prefer walking and cycling. But I was using them until earlier this year.

Considering Pure Gym is cheap, has reasonably decent equipment and is kept clean (at least where I am). The app being a bit shit sometimes is like a whatever problem IMO.

But exactly. The one thing you care about in a gym app is getting into the gym!

The app isn’t PureGyms core business though. I’d rather they spend £200k on extra squat racks in the gyms than on better UX on their app.

I can just memorise the 8 digit entry code and never ever open the app.

In a single weekend the OP changed the app experience from “somewhat annoying and frustrating” to “very convenient”.

The budget required to improve the customer experience is near nothing, but I suspect no one at PureGym has actually evaluated that the experience is really not great, they probably don’t have the experience or expertise to do so.

They are likely using cheap labour from India or something.. the deal went to the lowest bidder.

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