Client Challenge
A global fitness franchise, Metafit has consistently been one of the top-rated consumer workouts in the UK, delivering streaming audio and video content via their app and website, via a subscription service for franchisees with integrated payment gateway and API drive ecommerce backend.
Before they engaged with Gemstone IT, Metafit had a very basic website which offered one-off purchases for audio tracks. This poor user experience led to decreasing user engagement and retention rates and contributed to their inability to acquire a diverse user base. Metafit wanted to implement a digital solution that would:
- Increase end-user consumption to meet and exceed adoption and engagement goals
- Provide a cohesive experience across all assets
- Increase their digital footprint
- Improve prospects for monetization
Client Opportunity
To address these challenges, Metafit wanted to deliver an entirely native experience to its users. This included introducing a brand new website and mobile app created from the bottom up, with enhanced functionality and audio/video streaming features. However, with no internal product or design teams, Metafit’s success depended on Gemstone’s ability to meet the following requisites:
- Ability to coordinate project assets, lead discussions, and be subject matter experts when working with third-parties including: Amazon Web Services, Mailchimp, and individual content creators
- A proven track record of meeting aggressive time-to-market constraints as Metafit required the app launch to align with pre-planned promotional events — within a two-month timeline
- Ability to support a seamless video streaming experience across multiple platforms
- A structured system in place with proven ability to deliver speed, security, scalability, and performance in the media space
Our Solution
1- Leverage Our Video and Audio Cloud Hosting Expertise
As a fitness streaming platform, it is critical to provide an optimal video playback experience to users in order to continually engage them in authenticated and unauthenticated Metafit content. Leveraging our expertise in the latest online video solutions, and video cloud hosting, we worked with Metafit’s current Youtube integrations to optimize the viewing experience, and help their enterprise scale. This unique immersive experience incorporates authenticated live streaming, non authenticated curated video on demand, geolocation detection, payment integrations and subscription management.
2-Utilise Design Thinking To Create A Personalized User Experience and Improve Content Discovery
We leveraged insights from our intensive design thinking sessions to identify improvement areas and recommend mobile best practices. These insights allowed us to provide an easy-to-use experience with an updated UI, simplified navigation, logins, user onboarding, and intuitive user flows. These outcomes resulted in enhanced content discovery and personalized experiences catered for users across multiple jurisdictions.
3-Follow Our Agile App Development Framework To Meet Metafit’s Aggressive Timeline Faster
Our refined agile app development process enables us to break the development cycle into smaller fixed sprints, which allowed our team of experts to stay focused on a few key goals to deliver the highest possible business value at each sprint. This framework allowed us to design and develop a minimum viable product (MVP), with a prioritised product roadmap for Metafit. Following this framework helped us accelerate our time-to-market and deliver a fully functional product on time while still allowing for future product growth.
Results
With our industry expertise, world-class team, and refined agile development and design thinking processes, we were able to go above and beyond Metafit’s expectations. The app was launched in two months, meeting timeline restrictions, and has enabled Metafit to be in a position to compete with larger players in the fitness industry. Additionally, upon launch Metafit was able to see quantifiable results in their user engagement rates.
