With Caroline Girvan running one of the most popular YouTube channels in the UK for fitness workouts, health, and nutrition tips, she was quickly huge popularity, and within a couple years gained over 2+ million subscribers.
Due to the nature of YouTube, she felt limited by what she could offer her loyal subscribers, and so wanted an exclusive platform that could host all of her content. It was necessary to provide both mobile & web designs for the client, so that her new platform is as accessible as possible for her audience.
Whilst I inherited the initial design direction from a previous agency that they worked with, there were wast amounts of screens and considerations that had not been included. It was up to myself and the team to carry this through into a deliverable product built in Flutter.
With so many vital screens missing, it was essential that we first did an audit of what would be required from the developers to ensure we are providing them with all necessary designs. This was for both the mobile & web screens, although they were both in a similar state of completion.
Once we knew what was needed to be designed, we worked through each epic and did a full overhaul of the screens, creating about 4x the original amount provided to us.
During this time I worked extremely closely with the devs and the client, ensuring designs were readable and technically feasible as the prior agency had not proper utilised Figma’s auto layout feature. In specific cases such as the custom media player and music toggles, it was I who would lead the product direction with that to ensure the best user experience possible.
It was also essential for me to conduct multiple rounds of QA on the production builds in order to ensure that the end product was polished and true to the designs, as both myself and the client valued the attention to detail within the design, which promotes better user experience.
After working on-off this project for almost a year, the end result was a feature rich, accessible, and invigorating new suite of app that allowed Caroline to post brand new content and engage her audience in ways that she hadn’t been able to before. To highlight this, some of the outcomes from the project were:
- A single platform for all of her content, from workouts & programmes, to blogs & meal plans.
- Allow her to create new forms of content like ‘how-to’s’ & exercise challenges.
- Provide a new way to monetise her content that isn’t from YouTube ads.
- Health statistics linked to your workouts
- Listening to your own music whilst watching a video, rather than the video default.
- The ability to download your workouts for whenever you’re offline.
- Scheduling workouts within a custom designed calendar, with alerts & reminders
- Full comments function with text & image responses
As a result, the app now has a rating over 4.1 stars on both the App Store & Google Play, and was very heavily well received by her existing subscribers that migrated over.
