The New Year brings a fresh start and a new wave of motivation to make healthier choices through diet and exercise for many of us.
But a couple of months in to 2017, those resolutions can seem like a distant memory. To help you get back on track, our leisure centre web pages have changed for the better, making it easier than ever to find an activity that’s right for you and make a booking!
The leisure centre web pages are a priority area of the website for our content redesign project. Leisure centres need a different approach from other council services in the content redesign, because we’re promoting a business rather than a council service. High on their wish list were good looking pages with high Google search rankings.
The Lifestyle Active pages (Verwood Hub, Two Riversmeet and QE Leisure Centre) had recently undergone a content redesign so Purbeck Sports Centre was our main focus and we’ll be tackling the Gryphon Sports Centre pages in the next phase of the project.
Our starting point
Looking at the data using Google Analytics helped us identify the top tasks that users were carrying out on the leisure centre pages:
- swimming pool timetable, check you can go for a swim
- find out the cost of a gym membership
- book an exercise class
- find out directions to the leisure centre
- book a court
We tested these tasks out on users to see how they navigated the pages and how easily they found the information they needed to complete the tasks. Combined with the analytics data, this gave us a well-rounded picture of where users were struggling so we could make improvements.
So what did the user testing show? Users who did the tasks on a mobile device found that pages were too long with too much text. 65 per cent of users looked at the Purbeck Sports Centre pages using a mobile device, so this was a biggie. Users also found the booking process confusing because it wasn’t clear that only members can book online and some pages didn’t even link to booking information at all. A lot of users were going straight through to the leisure centre pages from Google search results, but exercise classes were all listed on one long page, which wasn’t great for our Google search ranking. There were other issues like unclear headings, over-complicated timetables and confusion over membership options.
Quick wins
With clear objectives from the user testing, we were able to make some quick improvements; action buttons were added for making a booking on every exercise class page, content was re-written and exercise classes were split out to individual pages to improve search results and look better on mobile devices i.e. less scrolling! We then did more user testing at Purbeck Sports Centre, repeating the original tasks to make sure our changes made sense to customers.
Now that the pages were optimised for search and had clear, concise and task-driven content, we could work on making them look better. We visited the leisure centres with our 360 camera to capture images of the swimming pool, gym and facilities and have added the virtual tours to the web pages. Shout-out to the Aqua Aerobics ladies who agreed to have their photo taken mid workout! Clickable image galleries have been added to the leisure centre homepages to promote offers and events and we’re working on updating the photos on the pages too.
We still need to optimise Purbeck Sports Centre’s booking system for mobile devices and are looking to create a better search for exercise classes so people can search by day, type of class and intensity. As content designers, our work is never done because we’re iteratively improving and reviewing web content. It’s just like going to the gym – you don’t get fit and then stop there, you’ve got to keep working to maintain and improve your fitness (I couldn’t resist a cheesy analogy)!
