Island Connect

IslandConnect is a dynamic app designed for fitness and yoga centers, providing a platform similar to Discord where gyms and instructors can create servers and group components. This allows users and members to chat, while trainers manage clients, schedule classes, and sell courses. The app also promotes member conversion, offers a space for posts and discussions, and enables the purchase of discount coupons and other transactions. With an easy-to-use interface, IslandConnect aims to streamline gym operations and enhance the fitness community experience.

Project Background and Challenges

At the project’s inception, we encountered several key challenges:

• The Chicken and Egg Dilemma: How to effectively connect businesses and users, ensuring mutual value from the platform’s early stages? Through in-depth analysis of the business model, we ultimately decided to break with convention and integrate both the user and administrative ends into a single, unified application.
• The Conflict Between Design Barriers and Marketing Efficiency: Businesses needed a quick and easy way to create visually appealing marketing posters, yet often lacked professional design skills. How could we lower the operational difficulty while ensuring the posters maintained a high level of professionalism and attractiveness?
• Complex Business Scenarios and Permission Management: The platform required support for multi-role, multi-level permission management to accommodate the complex operational needs of businesses. How could we design a permission system that was both flexible and easy to understand?

Our Solution: Simplifying Complexity, Connecting Endless Possibilities

Facing these challenges, our team, leveraging extensive design experience and a deep understanding of user needs, proposed the following innovative solutions:

Integrated Platform Design: Bridging Gaps, Connecting Efficiently

We innovatively integrated the user and administrative ends into a single application. This means that both regular users and business employees can join the platform through the same entry point. On the homepage, users can clearly see the business servers they have joined and seamlessly switch between user and administrative functions based on their role. This design elegantly solved the “chicken and egg” problem, lowered the barrier to entry for both users and businesses, and enhanced the overall operational efficiency of the platform.

Templated Poster Creation: Empowering Businesses, Simplifying Marketing

To address the pain points businesses faced in poster creation, we designed a built-in, template-based poster creation system. Administrators can modify existing professionally designed templates or create entirely new posters. We standardized the fonts, styles, and other design elements within the templates, allowing users to simply replace the content to generate visually appealing and professional promotional materials. This approach significantly lowered the barrier to entry and learning curve for businesses, enabling them to focus more on content creation and marketing promotion.

Multi-Level Linked Permission System: Granular Management, Flexible Authorization

In terms of permission management, we drew inspiration from Discord’s advanced system and innovated further based on Island Connect’s specific business requirements. We adopted a multi-level linked permission setting method, using numerical values like -1, 0, and 1 to intuitively define the hierarchy and scope of permissions. This design allows businesses to flexibly allocate and manage the permissions of different employees based on their actual operational needs, achieving granular operational management and ensuring the platform’s data security and operational order.

User-Centric Experience: Feature-Rich, Operationally Convenient

On the user side, we focused on providing a smooth and convenient user experience:

• Homepage: Users can easily switch between different business servers, view business information, popular services, discount coupons, popular service personnel, store facilities, and user reviews. The convenient function area supports booking, check-in, consultation, and access to the business’s circle (forum). Existing members can also invite others to join.
• Courses: After booking a course, users can view detailed course information and quickly check in or cancel their booking via QR code.
• My: The personal center allows users to modify their personal information, view their membership cards, manage orders, and check their consumption and service history across different stores.
• Circle: Users can freely post, share text and images, and interact with other users through comments and engagement.

Empowering Management: Efficient Operations, Granular Control

On the administrative side, we provided businesses with powerful operational management tools:

• Homepage: Business administrators can create and manage servers, set up basic store information, manage employees and customers (CRM system), and comprehensively manage courses. Employees with different roles have corresponding permissions to manage their assigned courses, services, and students, and can drive traffic by posting in the circle or sharing course information on other platforms. Staff can also assist member users with booking and canceling services or courses.
• Card Management: Staff can manage various types of customer cards (time-based cards, usage-based cards, amount-based cards), including topping up and deducting balances.
• Poster Creation: Administrators can easily create store promotional posters using the built-in templates and share them on other platforms for promotion.

Conclusion

The successful launch of the Island Connect project fully demonstrates our expertise in product design, interaction design, interface design, operational design, and brand design. We not only created a fully functional and user-friendly social commerce platform for our client but also solved the practical problems they encountered during platform construction and operation through innovative design concepts and a precise understanding of user needs. We believe that Island Connect will empower our client to build a new business ecosystem and achieve sustainable growth.