Project

Couch to Fitness Website Design

Project

Couch to Fitness Website Design

Client

Couch to Fitness

Industry

Charity

Services

Get fit for free.

Services

Our Parks is the biggest outdoor group exercise company in London, delivering free fitness sessions in local parks across London and the UK.

In response to the national lockdown in 2020, they developed a successful 9-week at-home fitness programme for beginners, with support from London Sport and funding by Sport England. Since then they have expanded their offering with a growing range of mini-programmes in a variety of different styles.

With the success of the Couch to Fitness programme, a UX audit was undertaken to identify ways in which the experience could be improved for existing users as well as how to attract potential users to the programme.

Our brief was to digest this research and put the findings into practice, innovating on the existing Our Parks platform and creating a new, stand-alone website to become a free hub for at home fitness and to house the growing library of programmes.

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The heartbeat

Helping people to become active from their own home.

Taking a deep dive into the research revealed a specific target market for the Couch to Fitness platform; females aged between 25 and 65 who are classed as ‘inactive’ or ‘insufficiently active’. It showed that these users had either contemplated trying work out programmes before or had possibly tried other programmes with little retention success and this was the biggest problem we needed to fix.

We felt the fundamental route to success of this brief was to keep the new website simple and let the content do the talking. The majority of current workout programme websites skew either to being very masculine and shouty, or ultra feminine and quiet. Our aim was to create a website that sat comfortably in the middle, being balanced enough to attract the right target audience whilst feeling motivational and exciting for those that were outside of the research findings.

Making workouts more rewarding.

The overall goal for the new Couch to Fitness platform was to get inactive people, active and feeling fitter by keeping them engaged and motivated with free fitness programmes. To help with this we added gamification into the users journey through the platform. As each individual progresses, they are awarded badges and achievements that they can collect, view in their own digital trophy cabinet and then share online with friends and family.

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Keeping content accessible on any device.

Becoming active should not be a chore, but instead should be quick and easy. To give all users to the site the best chance of becoming active, our focus was to make sure that accessibility was not a barrier to the content. We took this brief as an opportunity to focus on creating a widely accessible website, innovating on the wireframe journey where required and creating a mobile first user experience that supports user needs.

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The Results

The final result has given Couch to Fitness its own home. It’s no longer hidden among the Our Parks website but instead stands out clearly for people to discover and enjoy the workouts without becoming distracted by unnecessary or irrelevant content. The website has created a clear space for the library of programmes to live and continue growing, and has given its users a hub to help them stay motivated and achieve their goals of becoming and then staying active, whilst creating a sense of community even when members are in their own home.