We helped inspire more women to live active lifestyles
Our Parks have created a new way for women that are new to physical exercise to keep active. The Couch to Fitness programme is free to all and is built to appeal to those who have previously avoided fitness. The project is supported by Sport England as a tool for helping to develop communities through sport.
Challenge
Women’s sport is currently less popular than men’s and there is no reason it must continue to be so. And while growing women’s sport offers commercial opportunities, there is, of course, more at stake – equality in general.
After identifying that only 42% of users that sign up to the Couch to Fitness programme were actually completing, Our Parks wanted to completely overhaul the UI and UX of the platform in order to encourage more women to complete it.
We were also tasked with reducing the drop off rate from visitors to sign up which was 70%. We also facilitated better tracking to measure the impact the programme is having on their users.
An exciting challenge for GC, how can we engage infrequent exercisers with a home fitness programme that they do not give up on.
What we did
The project consisted of three main phases - Research, Wireframes and User Testing.
Working in collaboration, we started this project by hosting discovery workshops with all key stakeholders from the human tech agency, Sport England and Our Parks. The purpose of these sessions is to immerse ourselves in Our Parks goals and aspirations whilst creating a blueprint that will shape the rest of the project. Next, we started the research phase.
Research
Our goal going into this project was to try and get a better understanding of what was causing users to stop using the platform. To do this we conducted an online survey which was sent out via email to target users that dropped off and via the Our parks Facebook group to target active users. The Survey provided valuable quantitative information, but to further this research we conducted specific user interviews, targeting users that completed the programme and those that dropped off.
We used a number of tried and tested methodologies and platforms to gather feedback from both biased and unbiased users on what currently works well and where there are opportunities for enhancement. Alongside this, our experience team conducted competitor analysis and an analysis of behaviour change techniques (BCTs). Only once this is complete can we start to define new user journeys and designs.
User testing
From this we identified that a ‘lack of motivation’ was the main cause for users to stop using the app. We decided that the best way to act on this would be to use extrinsic motivators such as badges / rewards and create a seamless “Netflix” style user journey for returning users to help user engagement and general ease of use. Some of the behaviour change techniques that we identified wouldn’t fit into the scope of the current project so we collaborated with Our parks and London sport to create a roadmap of key changes (included in scope) and improvements to be implemented later on.
Wireframes
The final stage of the process is taking our new design to users for complete evaluation and testing.
For this, we created prototypes for mobile which displayed multiple key user journeys. Once the prototypes were built we focused on Real World User testing and analysed all these tests which allowed us to make consumer-led recommendations to optimise the final product.
To help with the successful development of the Couch to Fitness app we created a comprehensive strategy document which contained everything from discovery to research and creation of the wireframes, this document contains reasoning behind why certain changes were made and is backed by research. This Document acts as a central hub for the clients and development to access everything from the project in one place and will assist in the development of the PWA.
Born Barikor
CEO Our Parks
the human tech agency have delivered a fantastic project and I highly recommend their work and approach to anyone who wants to enhance their digital business through UX and behaviour change."