The UBC Recreation Website : Examination of the Personal Training Page for Staff and Faculty Compatibility
Creators: name: Cheok, Jeffrey
name: Ip, Derek
name: Kainth, Ryan
name: Lin, Wenny
name: Zhang, Rachael
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2019

description: The following is a study examining UBC Staff and Faculty perspectives on barriers regarding the participation in UBC Recreation’s Personal Training Program and their opinions on the UBC Recreation Website. Our goal is to provide recommendations to improve the Personal Training page of the UBC Recreation website to ultimately increase interest and participation in the Personal Training program. We believe the UBC Recreation website to be an integral part of informing the UBC population about the details of the programs. Enough information on the website should be provided to influence an individual’s decision on whether a program is a fit for them, which program to sign up for, and all the benefits to signing for said program. This directly relates to the suggestions we are planning to give to UBC Recreation about their website, which mostly relate to comprehensiveness, potential barriers, accessibility and clarity. Data collection occurred in two parts. Firstly, a survey was given out to the participants to determine their views on the UBC Recreation personal training page. Then, an interview was conducted with each participant to further evaluate their attitudes towards personal training and the personal training page. We chose to interview staff and faculty members from different areas and roles on campus to reflect the many diverse opinions on personal training. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative data allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. The quantitative data allows us to describe the general impression that our participants have on the UBC Recreation personal training page. The qualitative data allows us to capture the more intricate details of our participants’ experiences with the UBC recreation personal training page. From our survey, we found that none of the participants in our study have participated in a UBC personal training class. A number of barriers were identified, including not seeing a need for a personal trainer, feeling uncomfortable working out in front of students, and the student-centred nature of UBC Recreation itself. The latter is the most important barrier related to our study. Many staff and faculty members felt left out, as most of the promotional materials were targeted towards students. Changes can be made to the UBC recreation personal training website to cater more towards the staff and faculty members and improve their user experience. Three recommendations were formed through our study’s findings: making the information clearer and better organized, targeting different motivations for physical activity, and increasing material centered around staff and faculty. We believe that these recommendations will improve website user experience and motivate staff and faculty members to participate in personal training programs. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”