Group: Shane Lai, Arsh Kaushik, Tommy Tian
Course: INFO636 – Conversational UX Design
Author: Tommy Tian
Responsibility: Define the purpose of the agent, name the agent, write the content
Time Lapse: April 2026 – May 2026
Overview of BuildMyGym
“BuildMyGym” is an AI-powered personal training planner agent which helps you plan your training schedules, moderate your training sessions, and provides feedback and reports on your performance. With six states—standby, listening, speaking, encouraging, warning, and resting—it offers comprehensive guidance throughout your sessions. During the INFO636 – Conversational UX Design course, me, Shane Lai and Arsh Kaushik were partnered into a group for this project starting from April 2026.
We went through the process of defining the purpose and name of the agent, choose a proper metaphor for the agent, define and design the states, and combine all those elements into a poster to demonstrate the foundation of “BuildMyGym”, which is part of the final presentation of INFO636 – Conversational UX Design.
Why we decided to build an an AI-powered personal trainer?
While me and Shane Lai were discussing what type of agent we should design, both of us came up with the idea of designing an AI-powered personal trainer. Firstly, both of us loves exercising and training and use training software such as Apple Fitness+ and Strava a lot; secondly, both of us thought the current training software are not customized enough: everyone has different body conditions, so everyone who wants to stay healthy in their own ways deserves a personalized training schedule; sometimes people are not 100% sure about whether they perform properlly during their training sessions whereas most training software does not have reminding functions such as warning or encouraging at all, so we decided to design an AI-powered personal trainer which will provide personalized training sessions for users.
Choose the metaphor & design the states
We were asked in class to choose three metaphors and we chose heart, kettle bell, and weight plates. Kettle bells and weight plates are very common in gyms for weight lifting, whereas heart represents doing sports. Originally, we have seven states: standby, listening, guiding, encouraging, resting, reporting, and warning.
We were then required to present the sketches of our seven states of each metaphor, 21 in total, in front of class:
Below are my sketches:
We received the following feedbacks: we are not allowed to use faces, and the “guiding” and “reporting” states sounds quite similar; last but not least, we are only allowed to keep one metaphor.
Based on the discussion with the team, we decided to choose kettle bell. Heart might make people feel like this is a health agent instead of a sporting agent, whereas weight plates’s shape is barely a circle, and when we draw the movement animations, it might be hard to tell how it moves or rotates.
Our group combined the “guiding” and “reporting” states together into “speaking” and kept all other five states, and each of us were asked to draw a draft of the animations of the six states.
Arsh was responsible for combining our ideas of animations into a version that all of us can accept:
Design the poster
Our group now have decided the states and the metaphor, it is now for us to design the posters.
We looked at the examples provided during class. We should have the name of our agent, the name of group members, the name of professor and class, introduction of our agent, and description of each state.
We decided to choose the “Goolio” poster as example, we agreed to use black as background color since a lot of famous training software such as “Technogym” used black as background to create a feeling of black-themed gyms.
We used green as the color of the kettle bell since green looks refreshing and can standout on a black background, and below is the sketch of the 6 states with the kettle bell:
We then designed the first draft of the poster. I was responsible for the text and Shane was responsible for the mockups and animations.
We gave this draft to the professor, and received the following feedback: turn the dimension into 24*44 inches, and name each state in the introduction; we can also consider put the mockups together with the animations.
We designed the final version of the poster:
Conclusion
Our group worked well during the process, each member was assigned with equal amount of tasks and all tasks were completed in time.
We are all satisfied with the final design of the agent, the kettle bell looks dynamic and sticks to the theme of gym training, whereas all six states clearly demonstrate possible steps during personalized training.