App design · Fitness
A fitness app carrying the name of a double Olympic gold medallist, which sets the bar for how it has to feel.
Dame Kelly Holmes DBE
Sole UI designer
A London agency
iOS & Android
The problem
Dame Kelly Holmes won gold over 800m and 1500m at Athens in 2004 and still holds British records at 600, 800 and 1000 metres. That name attached to a fitness product sets an expectation of seriousness before anyone opens it.
The app had to reach a wide range of people trying to get fitter, most of them nowhere near elite and easily put off by a product that assumes they are. The design problem was carrying the credibility of the name without making a beginner feel they’d opened something meant for somebody else.
Branding carries the framing; the working parts of the app stay plain and usable.
What I did
Wireframes and reference apps arrived from the agency; the identity had to be layered onto them. I used the branding for warmth and authority in the framing, and kept the working parts of the app plain, so the name reassures rather than intimidates.
Training, recipes and the rest were designed as parallel entry points rather than a hierarchy leading with the hardest thing. Someone who came for the food plan shouldn’t have to walk past a training programme to reach it.
The brief wasn’t just to skin the wireframes. I worked back through the pain points that came out of the wireframing stage and resolved them in the UI, particularly the recipes, which needed to be followable one-handed in a kitchen. The first round of user testing came back positive.
Recipes designed to be followed one-handed, mid-task, in a kitchen.
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