HFE offer market-leading fitness courses and needed a way of delivering these to their customers in gyms and fitness centers all over the UK. The problem:
"Accessibility was the most crucial requirement we had. User experience for our students had to be excellent"
As HFE provide a wide range of courses ranging from sports massage to Pilates, they also have a large volume of training material associated with these courses – books, career guides and e-learning material, namely print editions of tests that needed to be created.
This material was printed (and printed often). As anyone in the business of buying print knows, good quality production values can often be expensive - especially for the sort of high-frequency, small-volume print runs HFE were used to. Digital therefore represented an opportunity to move away from this model and save money.
As a result, HFE needed an app for students who had signed up for their courses – essentially a repository that could be easily accessed from the same smartphone devices and tablets that proliferate so widely on gym floors these days which preserved the same sort of high-quality look and feel of a glossy print edition of a training manual while cutting down on attendant print costs.
In consulting with them, we also discovered that HFE had issues with students being unable to navigate their way easily around their website and find the appropriate course materials and mock examination papers. So an intuitive user experience with clearly labelled categories for each type of course material was a key requirement, regardless of device. Accessibility was a key aim from the outset.
Finally, HFE had produced a large amount of interactive content using Articulate, a well-established name in e-learning content creation - so any solution needed to be able to integrate with Articulate-created materials smoothly.
“We stand to save about £10,000 per year on print costs as a result of moving to an app”
- Director of Operations, HFE
YUDU’s native iOS and Android apps provided an ideal fit for HFE to publish all of their course materials, career guides and e-learning material.
The back-end architecture also empowered them to provide people who were sold courses elsewhere – for example through the HFE website – to be given a login to the app that then provided them instant access to the course materials they had signed up for.
YUDU helped HFE to solve another key problem of any app-based project by integrating Articulate-created content within the app smoothly, without a hitch, giving students access to interactive examinations that greatly enhanced the learning process.
The problem of user experience was solved by HFE making good use of YUDU's internal creative team to build both smartphone and tablet-specific user interfaces that gently guided the end user to the relevant part of the app through clear and consistent sign-posting. The choice to adopt a completely separate UI for smartphones also led to greater engagement from smartphone users.
The result of this project was to successfully provide students taking HFE-backed courses with a mobile-first way of engaging with their content, allowing them to take mobile devices onto the gym floor making them "more accessible than ever before" according to one content marketing executive, while also helping HFE to save significant costs on printing such materials.
