Our work
Everyone Active
- Product design & build
The Challenge
Administering lesson programmes required hundreds of staff across swim centres nationwide and long queues
Trained front-of-house staff would be overrun by parents registering their children for the appropriate swimming lesson level to match their child's ability, whilst those with children completing a lesson level needed to transfer their child to a new session for a convenient date and time.
The swimming lessons schedules resulted in a high concentration of requests for a verbose administration process on weekday evenings (peak leisure centre times). Other users of the facility would be blocked from accessing the support of the centre's trained and supportive staff.
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The Approach
Defining the interactions and optimising the user experience
The Lessons Online product needed to handle processes that were handled by front-of-house staff on multiple screens and systems, with the benefit of being able to converse with a parent to clarify the child's ability and reassure the parent.
We undertook working sessions with key stakeholders from sales, operations, product and applications teams to map the data exchanges and customer inputs required, before blending the knowledge of swim coaches and instructors within our own team with the expertise within the client.
Working closely with the client's back end systems provider, we identified and defined new API methods for the reservation of session spaces, transferring out of and in sessions and the need to clean up the state of user accounts from incomplete sessions.
The execution.
Lessons Online: Design and build of a bespoke product to out-perform resource heavy processes
Technical Consulting
User Experience
Performance in Build
Despite the advantages granted by a face-to-face experience, each lesson sign-up was taking over 20 minutes. Our user experience practitioners set about identifying the requirements of each key touch point - finding a pool, showing the lesson programme, assessing the child's ability, showing session availability, reserving your slot and transacting online.
Working closely with our product engineers, we crafted journeys and data exchanges in tandem. Keeping a keen eye on API performance with large volumes of data, we designed user journeys and interfaces that would out-performance the in-centre operation from the data imports and API methods available.
The lessons online product (a single page application built in ReactJs) accommodated for a the absence of a session reservation method whilst the middleware (PHP Laravel application) handled lists of jobs designed to check transactions to ensure slots were not filled by incomplete user sessions.
The end result delivered a bespoke product that takes the resource-intensive in-centre process and puts it into the hands of parents using any device they choose at home.
The average time taken by customers using the product is 7 minutes end-to-end; that's a 65% efficiency gain whilst freeing up hundreds of thousands of staff and customers hours for other tasks.
The flexibility of any product design and build will always pay dividends. In this instance, more areas of the client's business have migrated onto the lessons online product, bringing new capability profiling criteria with each one. This is one of the reasons our work was recognised for a UK Active Digital Transformation Award.
A snapshop of success
Safely profiling children against lesson frameworks and transacting in high volumes
Enabling parents to sign-up their children for swim lessons, and to transfer booked sessions online, posed significant business and customer benefits. However, accurately assessing the ability of a child's current swimming ability to ensure they enter at the right level is not only imperative for health and safety, but it also has a significant impact on a child's water confidence and their engagement in developing this life skill.
14,000
staff hours saved within 3 months by enabling online lesson bookings for over a hundred swim centres
ROI boosted by overhead savings
7 mins
to profile your child's swim capability, find convenient sessions for their level and buy online via Direct Debit
Safe profiling and easy transactions
>500k
monthly visits by parents exploring the most suitable and convenient lessons for their children
Technology built to scale
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Technology.
Choosing the right tech to meet the key objectives
Everyone Active's Lessons Online product needed frameworks that would be fast, secure and flexible whilst also being capable of handling complex business logic. The infrastructure automatically scales with demand as evening lessons lead to level completion which introduces a new wave of parents needing to transfer their child to a new session.
React
ESNext
Laravel
AWS
Docker
BitBucket
Jira
VS Code
Figma
“Partnering with Mediablaze has been instrumental in transforming Everyone Active. Under their guidance, we were able to align content, CRM and digital marketing to improve customer service, increase sales and retention. Together, we were able to fulfil our mission of ensuring in-centre services were available online. It has been a real privilege to work with industry leaders to deliver our digital experience.”
Tim Mayer
Digital and Marketing Communications Manager
Everyone Active
