From User to Product Designer
Mithrion is a Netherlands-based health and fitness application combining personalized workouts, mobility, body analysis, and nutrition.
My relationship with Mithrion began before I joined the team: I was a user.
I experienced the product as someone beginning a fitness journey, trying to understand my body, exercise correctly, and build a sustainable routine. Later, I became the product designer responsible for redesigning that experience.
Over five months, I restructured the entire application: its design system, information architecture, onboarding, home experience, workouts, mobility, nutrition, progress tracking, body audits, and subscriptions.
The goal was not simply to modernize the interface. It was to make Mithrion’s expertise visible and transform disconnected capabilities into one coherent product.
My Role
As Product Designer, I led user research, product strategy, prioritization, information architecture, interaction and visual design, design-system strategy, and end-to-end flow design.
The redesigned experience is live and used by real customers.
The Challenge
Users trusted the knowledge behind Mithrion’s programs. Several described meaningful results, including reduced pain, improved strength, and the ability to exercise without recurring injuries.
However, the application did not communicate that value clearly.
The experience assumed an ideal workout: every machine would be available, exercises would be completed in order, users would keep their phones nearby, and nobody would forget to finish a session.
Reality was different.
Users trained in crowded gyms, exercised at home, felt pain, ran out of time, needed alternatives, and sometimes left a workout unfinished.
“The app always assumes a happy flow. But in reality, that often doesn’t happen.”
Important features also felt disconnected. Users could not easily understand why they received a particular program, how their feedback influenced future recommendations, or whether their effort was producing meaningful change.
Mithrion’s intelligence existed behind the interface, but the product still felt like a black box.
Learning From Users
I interviewed 10 users and synthesized six in-depth first-round interviews for this stage of the redesign. I also studied products such as Fitbod, Hevy, SmartGym, Freeletics, Strava, and AI-powered fitness services.
Five recurring needs emerged:
- Show me the plan. Users wanted to review the full workout, prepare for new movements, and plan around unavailable equipment.
- Guide me without slowing me down. Constant tapping, inconsistent controls, intrusive timers, and difficult-to-find instructions interrupted workouts.
- Adapt to real life. Users needed to reorder, replace, or skip exercises and recover from mistakes without contacting support.
- Make personalization visible. People wanted to understand why exercises were selected and how their diagnosis, limitations, and feedback affected the program.
- Show me my progress. Users could feel improvement, but the app did not clearly reflect changes in strength, consistency, posture, or body audits.
These findings changed the direction of the redesign. The problem was not a lack of features—it was a lack of connection, clarity, and feedback.
Building the Strategy
As a startup, Mithrion could not stop development while the complete product was rebuilt.
I prioritized problems based on severity, frequency, business value, technical effort, and their position in the customer journey. We began with onboarding and early activation, then improved the experience page by page.
This incremental approach allowed us to release meaningful changes while building toward a consistent long-term vision.
I also replaced the difficult-to-maintain internal design system with an established external foundation adapted to Mithrion’s identity.
This gave the team more reliable components, faster delivery, greater consistency, and more time to focus on problems unique to the product.
Redesigning the Experience
I organized the product around a continuous journey:
Understand your body → receive a plan → take action → record the work → see progress → adapt
From Dashboard to Daily Guide
The previous home screen presented several features without clearly prioritizing them.
I redesigned it around one question: What does the user need now?
The hierarchy changes throughout the day, bringing the next workout, mobility routine, meal, or progress update into focus.
Users can immediately see their workout focus, estimated duration, intensity, daily mobility, next meal, weekly activity, and body-audit status.
Instead of asking users to assemble their own plan, Mithrion now provides a clear next action.
A Workout Flow Designed for Real Conditions
Research showed that users wanted visibility and control. Some took screenshots or moved their workouts into other applications just to see the full session.
The redesigned workout overview exposes the complete structure before training begins, including the warm-up, exercises, sets, duration, and cool-down.
During each movement, users can access:
- Previous performance and today’s recommendation
- Sets, repetitions, weight, and rest
- Exercise demonstrations and form guidance
- Targeted muscle groups
- Common mistakes
- Alternative movements
Timed exercises, active rests, strength sets, and multi-round movements now follow clearer and more consistent patterns.
Essential actions remain prominent, while detailed education is available when needed. Beginners receive guidance, and experienced users can move quickly.
Making Personalization Understandable
Users questioned how their diagnosis and feedback influenced the program.
The redesigned experience makes those relationships visible. Workout recommendations reference previous performance, mobility routines connect directly to audit findings, and long-term programs explain their goals and phases.
Semester screens now communicate:
- Program purpose
- Start and end dates
- Current week
- Load and deload phases
- Completion progress
- Previous sessions
Personalization no longer has to be taken on trust; users can see the logic behind their journey.
Connecting Mobility and Nutrition to Daily Life
Corrective exercises were valued, but users often forgot them because they existed outside the primary routine.
I introduced shorter mobility sessions connected to specific findings, surfaced them on the home screen, and added flexible reminders.
Nutrition also moved from generic content to a structured daily plan. Meals are organized by time of day and include calories, macronutrients, ingredients, and an explanation of how they support the user’s goals.
Both features now feel like parts of the same plan rather than separate sections.
Turning Activity Into Visible Progress
One of the strongest findings was that users felt physical improvement, but the product did not show it.
I redesigned the activity log and progress experience to communicate:
- Strength development
- Exercise-level improvement
- Training frequency and volume
- Mobility completion
- Body-score changes
- Posture and balance improvements
- Changes between body audits
Audit reports now organize complex results into posture, balance, and body composition. Users can compare assessments, understand what needs attention, and connect each finding to an action.
Mithrion no longer shows only what users completed. It shows what their work produced.
Impact
For users, the redesign delivers clearer daily direction, greater control during workouts, more visible personalization, actionable mobility and nutrition guidance, and a stronger understanding of long-term progress.
For Mithrion, it creates:
- A scalable product and design foundation
- Faster, more consistent delivery
- Clearer communication of the subscription’s value
- Stronger activation and conversion experiences
- More reasons for users to return
- Better support for long-term retention
Long-term quantitative results are still being measured. However, the live product now has the structure required to evaluate activation, workout completion, mobility adherence, retention, and subscription conversion meaningfully.
Reflection
The research revealed that Mithrion did not need a new reason to exist. Users already believed in the expertise behind its programs.
The product needed to reveal that expertise through the experience.
Being both a user and the designer gave me a unique starting point, but redesigning the product required much more: validating assumptions, identifying patterns, balancing user and business needs, working within startup constraints, and turning fragmented feedback into a scalable system.
I began this journey as someone trying to follow a workout.
Five months later, I had redesigned the product guiding the entire journey.