AdiClub
Envisioning the first membership program that rewards both physical activity & purchase.
Main goals
Craft an experience vision for the Adidas membership program in the Running and Training apps.
Increase user awareness and engagement, on our way to rewarding physical activities of 500 million members by 2025.
Main contributions
Crafted UX strategy and brought it to life through gamification, community building, subscription and partnerships.
Managed 4 direct reports in 4 cross-functional development squads to deliver improvements.
The Adidas Running and Training apps help millions of people lead better and more active lives
These are companion fitness apps that let you track runs, follow guided workouts and training plans, and stay motivated through a global fitness community.
A loyalty program is straightforward in a shopping app, but how to bring it to the context of fitness in a way that truly motivated users and the teams building it?
AdiClub (formerly known as Creators Club) is a membership program that rewards users with points, levels, and exclusive benefits for their activities and purchases. In 2019, Adidas tested AdiClub within their shopping apps and, after seeing promising results, decided to extend it to its fitness apps. The program was intended as a trial, which resulted in a simple MVP implementation.
While the trial resulted in 50 million members acquired, 45 million in net sales, and significant increases in order frequency, order value, and customer lifetime value, the membership program struggled to fit seamlessly into the motivational and performance focus of the fitness apps and teams were resistant to embrace this new project. They were saying:
To position AdiClub as a key differentiator driving engagement and brand loyalty, we faced a few main challenges:
How might we…
integrate AdiClub into the fitness experience in a meaningful way?
unify stakeholders with different goals to evolve a joint experience?
prioritize not only business unit needs and technical solutions but also user experience improvements?
In comes an experience vision: not just a strategy, but a story of what a dramatically improved membership in fitness could be like.
To address our challenges, I employed a narrative-driven experience vision, inspired by my experience in Jared Spool’s UX Strategy Leaders Program. Unlike the company’s broad vision statement, this approach could paint a tangible picture of what membership could be like for our fitness app users. By grounding it in research, shaping it as a narrative, and projecting 5–7 years into the future, it could give teams a shared aspiration, connect with people on an emotional level, and help break through the existing ambiguity without being overly prescriptive.
The project evolved a lot over time, and so did my role. What started as an exploratory initiative then grew into a company-wide priority.
I started this project deep in research and strategy as a Principal Product Designer, working closely with the single squad behind AdiClub. As membership grew into a company-wide priority, I stepped up as UX Design Lead for the Running and Training apps, guiding 4 designers across 4 squads through execution and delivery, and partnering with Directors in Product, Marketing, and Engineering to set the overall direction.
The journey kicked off with the experience vision in Q1 2021, moved into foundational tech work in Q2, and the delivery of the first building block in Q3, becoming a long-term strategic effort I led until leaving Adidas in Q3 2023.
The overall process followed these key steps:
Learn from
users
Run user research, map the user journey, and map opportunities to possible solutions.
Envision better experience
Set UX outcomes, UX metrics, and create a user experience vision narrative.
Plan
improvements
Categorize the work, prioritize, roadmap, map dependencies, and pitch for support.
Deliver
outcomes
Design and implement solutions, measure results, and plan iterations.
To turn the UX vision into a tool that guided decisions rather than just a decorating slide, research was needed to give the story depth, relevance, and credibility.
To collect information on how users perceived the basic experience that was in place for AdiClub, I worked together with the designer in the AdiClub squad to temporarily activate a feedback card in the apps, gathering input from more than 15.000 users. With this, we discovered major pain points:
Redeeming rewards was too complicated
A user asked: “Please simplify receiving rewards after reaching a level. Getting the free 3 months of Premium subscription feels impossible, I never figured out how to do it".
Levels and point system were too ambitious
A user wrote: “I find the level jumps very big. Although I train a lot with the app, I know that I cannot reach the level I want within a year before the points expire".
Rewards were not motivating enough
A user said: “I'm really motivated by earning points but I wish I could get more rewards with them. I often wonder why I even bother because the rewards aren't that enticing".
To get the full picture of the different AdiClub touchpoints and identify the gaps in experience, we mapped the path from discovery to ongoing engagement.
Drawing from the user research, as well as interviews with Customer Service, user acquisition, and partnership teams, I led the mapping of the key touchpoins and what users did, thought, and felt while interacting with the membership program.
With this, we observed:
AdiClub was nowhere in the onboarding experience
From the app store to registration and early sessions, AdiClub was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t highlighted as a differentiator in acquisition channels, and users had to proactively find it in the Profile tab to make sense of it themselves.
No feedback loop connecting activities to rewards
Users earned points from workouts and challenges, but the app never told them. We missed a key moment to reinforce progress and boost motivation.
Users were not recognized for their efforts and loyalty
Levelling up was hard, and when users did, the app didn’t celebrate it. Rewards weren’t appealing for fitness-focused users, and redeeming the Premium subscription (the only in-app reward) was frustrating. Points piled up unused, turning into a business liability.
We then summarized and categorized the identified opportunities, moving from "here's what's broken" to "here's where we can make an impact".
To keep the user at the center of the experience and the focus on problems to solve rather than jumping straight to feature details, I guided the squad's designer and PM in the mapping of opportunities. We grouped them by themes, and put the current experience in contrast to a better future state, starting to give shape to the vision.
To keep teams focused on outcomes over output, we had to define success through the user’s eyes, and agree on how to measure it.
As the project at that point only had a strong focus on the business, I collaborated with stakeholders to define outcomes and metrics focused on the user. For this, I turned to Jared Spool’s framework, starting with a deceptively simple question: “If we do a fantastic job delivering a great adiClub experience, how will we improve someone's life?”. This turned the work from “we shipped this feature”“users now feel motivated to exercise more”. Here is a sample of what the outcomes and metrics looked like:
Forming habits
Outcome: Members are more likely to sustain a fitness habit as their progress is celebrated.
Metrics (members vs. non-members): median activity streak length, drop-off rate, % still active at 3/6/12 months.
Exercising more
Outcome: Members feel motivated to exercise more as higher efforts lead to more rewards.
Metric (members vs. non-members): workout frequency per active month, % of users joining a challenge.
Getting rewards
Outcome: Members feel tangible benefits in being a member by regularly taking advantage of meaningful rewards.
Metrics: reward redemption rate, repeat redemption rate, time-to-redemption, NPS on rewards, feature adoption tied to rewards.
Building loyalty
Outcome: Members feel recognized for their loyalty and commitment, and proud of being members.
Metrics: % of members interacting with features tied to loyalty (e.g., level-up screens, badges), % sharing AdiClub achievements, CSAT on recognition.
We set out to craft an experience vision that closed gaps in the experience, connected to our strategic pillars, and was an inspiring story to guide our work.
We wrote a compelling experience vision narrative through the view of one of our personas, created supporting illustrations, and presented it to our peers and upper management to collect feedback. This collaboration not only strengthened the vision itself, but created a sense of shared ownership that made it easier to rally teams around it later on.
It was time to get practical and break down the work, prioritizing, roadmapping and highlighting dependencies.
Drawing from the opportunities we mapped, we built a rough roadmap to visualize how this work could roll out over time. This became a tool not just for internal alignment, but also to pitch for more resources and cross-team support. As we identified legacy tech and disconnected systems that would make progress slower and less linear than we would like, this overview gave everyone (especially upper management) a clear idea of what delivering would take. This then informed a team reorg, growing AdiClub support from 1 to 4 cross-functional squads.
Our first step was to fix the experience of redeeming a Premium subscription when levelling up, contributing to users feeling a tangible benefit in being a member.
When levelling up on AdiClub, users earned a free Adidas Running and Training Premium subscription. However the experience to redeem this reward was fragmented across apps, extremely long, and overly complex. Users were not informed about their available reward and the process took at least 14 steps, which led to 81% of members never redeeming their rewards and over 300 issues were being reported monthly to customer support.
Fixing this was important not only to a better experience, or to reduce the burden on the support team, but also to increase traffic from users of the Adidas to the Running app. Tackling this became our first priority, and I guided the UX Designer in the responsible squad in reaching a simple and intuitive solution given our constraints.
This redesign not only streamlined the process and made the experience more intuitive and joyful, but it also led to these impressive results already in the first month after the release:
This was just the first improvement delivered to AdiClub as part of this project. We continued to work through the building blocks, and by 2021, Adidas Running and Training users who were part of AdiClub had:
With the groundwork behind us, we switched from big-picture thinking to hands-on design, turning complex problems into tangible UIs.
While there was a significant amount of foundational tech work happening behind the scenes, I led the team in working ahead of development to explore and validate new engagement concepts. A key direction we explored was a gamification framework, which soon revealed complexity, as decisions on points and levels had to align with other Adidas teams whose goals and user needs differed. Despite the challenges, through strategy alignment, cross-squad collaboration, and rapid usability testing, the team built a foundation for features that increased motivation, celebrated progress, and strengthened member loyalty. Below are some concepts explored by my team of designers.
This project gave me a front-row seat to the challenges and the rewards of driving large-scale strategic change.
It wasn’t always smooth: shifting stakeholders, legacy tech, and the alignment with different business areas definitely kept things interesting. But it also pushed me to grow as a designer and leader. Here’s what I took with me:
Turning tools into strategy
While I used many methods I was already familiar with, this was the first time I brought them together into an experience vision. It taught me how powerful a well-crafted narrative can be in inspiring teams and influencing direction, even if it doesn't land with everyone in the same way. Some people connected more with the user journey map or the building blocks, which showed me that communicating vision requires flexibility and empathy for how others think.
Collaboration at scale
As this project went from a small trial to the top priority across the entire Adidas digital organization, new stakeholders kept joining… and changing. While sometimes exhausting and frustrating, I learned how important it is to actively map relationships, build trust, and stay aligned on shared goals, especially when working across functions like Product, Engineering, and Marketing.
Working with a long-term horizon
Unlike fast-paced feature work, this was a slow, layered process. The strategic nature of the project required a different pace, balancing quick wins with long-term thinking, and staying focused even when progress wasn’t always visible. As design started working ahead of tech, designers often struggled with motivation as it took them long to see the impact of their work, which taught me how to lead through uncertainty and stay committed to a bigger vision over time.
This project sharpened my ability to persuade leaders to create better user experiences, navigate team members through ambiguity, and stay grounded in what truly matters to users and the business. And that’s something I’ll carry into every challenge ahead.
