SUPERMONKEY
Three years of growth design for the fitness brand that refused to sell annual cards.
- Role
- Senior Experience Designer
- Timeline
- ~3 years
- Scope
- Mini-program · APP · Back-office · Campaign Design
- Year
- 2020 – 2023
Overview — 01
Context
SUPERMONKEY is a Chinese fitness unicorn with a famously opinionated product model — pay-per-class, no annual contracts, a "just walk in" brand feel. Across three years I worked on almost every customer-facing surface: mini-program, APP, back-office tools for studio ops, and the campaign design that drives their heavy seasonal pushes (Super Friday, Double 11).
My job was growth design, defined precisely: use design to move user behaviour along the flow — discover, book, attend, share — and to carry that behaviour into repeatable habits.
Overview — 02
The problem
Pay-per-class means the product can never relax — every single session has to be re-sold. Three problems compounded:
1. The booking flow was decision-heavy. Users had to juggle city, studio, coach, schedule, and class type before reaching a "Book" button. Cognitive load bled conversion.
2. Wayfinding to studios was a real cause of class no-shows. Users couldn't find obscure mall units and gave up.
3. The in-app experience had no post-class emotional hook, so habit formation was weak. Users kept booking, but the product was never a daily presence.
01 — Design principles
Design principles: cards · emotion · growth
The three lenses I put on everything, from booking screens to campaign banners. They kept the team honest about what a design change was meant to do.
02 — Booking flow
Group class purchase — five screens, one thought
Schedule → confirm → pay → details → post-class care. I re-sequenced the flow so each screen does one thing well, picks up the baton cleanly, and hands the user forward — including the easy-to-miss after-class touch.
03 — Wayfinding
Store Guide — a spec to stop being late for class
Based on repeated user complaints of 'I can't find the studio' I authored a wayfinding spec — which line, which exit, walking cues, photographed entrances — then rolled it out to every city's ops team so studio staff could populate the template locally.
04 — Campaign design
Super Friday · Double 11
Two flagship seasonal campaigns where design has to hit number targets. I owned visual direction and conversion-critical surfaces across both.
05 — APP
Super Mock — four modules, one rhythm
Community / class schedule / fitness centre / profile. Each module has a different job but shares one visual language, so moving between them feels like navigating one thought, not four apps.
06 — Data & habit
Fitness centre & post-class sharing
Data is the emotional receipt of a workout. I designed a fitness centre dashboard with personal training stats and movement records, then paired it with share templates that turn that receipt into a post worth showing off.
The Process
Key decisions
- 01
Cards earned the right to replace lists
A card-based layout is more expensive per screen — bigger gaps, more imagery, fewer items visible. I defended the change because the previous list-density was compressing conversion: users scrolled faster but decided slower. The card rhythm gave each class its own moment of attention, and the numbers followed.
- 02
Wayfinding is design work
Nobody asked me to ship a Store Guide spec. Classes were being missed because studios were hard to find; that's a UX problem, regardless of whether it appears on a screen. Making the spec ops-friendly — one template, locally populated — turned a chronic complaint into a procedural fix that scaled without me.
- 03
Treat the share template as a product
Post-class sharing was the cheapest acquisition channel the product had, but the share templates were an afterthought. I redesigned them with the same care as in-app screens — multiple layouts, tasteful graphics, real data — and turned a polish-task into a recurring growth surface.
Impact
What the work actually did.
01
The problem it solved
Booking friction was reduced in a category where pay-per-class means every booking matters. Studio wayfinding stopped being a recurring complaint. Post-class sharing stopped being an afterthought and became a recurring growth channel. Across three years the product's tempo settled into one clear visual rhythm across every surface.
02
How the design answered
Design decisions were treated as behavioural experiments — cards vs lists, hover vs permanent actions, share layouts A/B/C — with the outcome always measured against a number in the funnel. Growth came from accumulating small wins grounded in evidence, not single redesigns.
03
Value left behind for the team
- 01
Super Friday traffic up 21.73% after the booking-flow redesign.
- 02
2021 Double 11 recharge hit RMB 140M — 30% over target, a single-campaign company record.
- 03
2022 Double 11 recharge RMB 178M — 25% YoY growth on the previous year's record.
- 04
Store Guide spec rolled out across all city-level ops teams, adopted as an ongoing studio-onboarding standard.
- 05
Post-class AIGC share templates scaled to 16 categories with 200+ entries, and became one of the top self-referred growth channels.
Reflection
What this project leaves me with.
Three years inside a single product is an unusual thing for a designer today, and it changed how I work. You cannot outrun your own decisions; every flow you shipped eighteen months ago comes back and asks you what you meant. That pressure turns you into someone who leaves notes for future-you — and, it turns out, good notes for future-you are also good specs for the rest of the team.
The other lesson: treat emotion as a measurable variable. It is uncomfortable to put numbers next to "how the post-class screen feels", but the moment you do, you can actually move it. Most of my highest-leverage work at SUPERMONKEY came from that uncomfortable posture.
If I had a fourth year, I'd push much harder on coach-to-user feedback loops — a space where the product is still mostly transactional, but where the emotional business value is the largest.