FlexLog
With countless gym apps on the market, I noticed a gap: very few offer a minimal, distraction-free way to log weightlifting progress. Most are cluttered with extra features that get in the way of the core task—tracking sets, reps, and progress over time. Drawing from both my personal gym experience and conversations with friends, I set out to design a lightweight weightlifting tracker that prioritizes simplicity, clarity, and consistency.
Prototype Overview
The Problem
Most gym apps are packed with features, but they overwhelm users who simply want to log their weightlifting progress. Excessive options, cluttered interfaces, and unnecessary add-ons create friction, making it harder to stay consistent. This complexity often leads to frustration, abandonment, or a lack of clear progress tracking.
How might we design a minimal, intuitive weight-tracking app that helps users stay focused on their progress without distractions?
Understanding Our Users
I first needed to understand how people currently track their weightlifting progress and where existing solutions fall short. To do this, I interviewed 10 people—a mix of friends, acquaintances, and regulars at my local gym. I asked about the tools they use, their frustrations, and what they wished was different.
From these conversations, a few clear patterns emerged:
Feature overload: 3 participants used the free tier of popular fitness apps, but said weightlifting felt like a side feature buried among nutrition logs, workout plans, and other tools they never touched.
Poor design quality: 2 participants used simple weightlifting tracker apps but complained that the interfaces were clunky and visually unappealing.
DIY workarounds: 5 participants defaulted to using their iPhone Notes app, preferring its simplicity despite the lack of features like progress visualization, but complained that there was no way to visualize data in charts or graphs with this method.
Key insights from user research:
Users want weightlifting to be the main focus, not an afterthought in a general fitness app.
Simplicity is valued: people want a clean, straightforward, utilitarian experience that offers weight logging and stat-tracking features.
A large portion of users are making do with non-specialized tools, showing there’s a gap for a focused yet thoughtfully designed solution.
Ideation and Visual Design
Based on research insights and the defined project scope, my goals became clear:
Simplify Progress Logging
Strip away unnecessary features to keep the focus on sets, reps, weight, and progress.
Make logging quick enough to use mid-workout without breaking flow.
Design a Minimal, Focused Interface
Replace cluttered layouts with a clean, approachable design.
Prioritize weightlifting as the core experience, not a side feature.
Improve Visual Readability & Motivation
Use hierarchy and contrast to make actions stand out.
Provide informative insights on lifting progress.
In Figma, I created a first look at the final product before user testing:
The Final Feature
After prototyping and preliminary user testing, the FlexLog was born!
The final design includes a streamlined workout history focused solely on sets, reps, and streamlined weight logging, along with a clean progress logging flow that makes tracking effortless mid-workout. Visual elements such as contrast, hierarchy, and spacing were refined to improve readability, accessibility, and overall simplicity. A "Statistics" page was added to improve user visibility into weightlifting progress over time.
Outcomes
I tested the prototype with 5 of the initially surveyed weightlifters:
All preferred the minimal tracker over their current method, citing less frustration in logging weights, and quicker logging, and satisfaction with the idea of progress indicators through the Statistics page.
Testers logged workouts with significantly fewer steps compared to their usual apps or iPhone Notes.
Takeaways
Utility is the foundation of good design.
This project reminded me that products don’t need endless features to be valuable — they need to work well for the job they’re meant to do. By stripping away distractions and focusing only on weight tracking, the design became not just simpler, but more useful.
Resisting feature creep is a design skill.
It’s easy to assume more features equal more value, but real utility comes from clarity and focus. The hardest (and most rewarding) part of this project was saying “no” to anything that didn’t serve the primary goal: helping users log their progress quickly and consistently.
The big picture: design is about enabling, not impressing.
At its core, product design isn’t about dazzling users with complexity — it’s about creating tools that quietly support their goals and help them succeed without getting in the way.
Looking Ahead
In the future, I’d like to expand usability testing with a larger and more diverse group of lifters to validate the design across different experience levels and gym routines. Gathering deeper insights on real-world use would help refine the app further, especially in terms of speed, accessibility, and motivation. Ultimately, my goal is to take FlexLog beyond a case study and develop it into a launch-ready product that fills the gap for a simple, focused, and effective weightlifting tracker.