Driving revenue through community

I led the design of a community platform for Beachbody

Beachbody’s goal was driving engagement, to increase retention

Data showed that when Beachbody’s subscribers were engaged with their app (see case study), they churned at a lower rate. However, there were a few hurdles to user engagement that had to be overcome.

  • Users only work out once a day, if that. Beachbody’s app was centered around workout videos, but the workout was the only time subscribers were using the app, which limited their engagement and Beachbody’s opportunity to drive more revenue.

  • Beachbody’s main offering was weeks-long fitness programs, which took serious motivation to be able to follow.

Workout groups addressed both hurdles

We did focus groups and interviews around these hurdles, and aligned on the idea of workout groups.

If subscribers could follow programs in groups, with a supportive, motivating community manager, it would give them something to do in the app when they weren’t working out. A group would also give users the support and accountability they needed to complete challenging fitness programs.

My team’s role

So we embarked on the huge task of creating this platform. My team had a central role in the project and was responsible for:

  • user research, including initial discovery research and on-going user testing on features

  • UX, including customer journeys, user flows, and wireframes

  • product branding and marketing screens

  • a community manager experience, which included tools for setting up and branding a group, managing invites, tracking participant behaviors, and also included a learning platform with resources and content templates

  • a cross-platform participant experience where users could track and share their activities, comment and react via a social feed, create personal profiles to connect with the community, and engage with a community manager via a live video experience

We started with research and UX

We did various research methods (survey and user interviews) to learn high-level about the value of community and also about specific features.

We also did a variety of high-level UX activities, customer journeys, site and app maps, user flows, etc.

We did co-creation with potential community managers

Beachbody had 250,000+ re-sellers that earned commissions from their customers. So they naturally became our community managers and were valuable partners in the design process. We wanted their buy-in and also wanted to leverage their knowledge of the user base.

We did co-creation activities with them to explore features and fine-tune the UI.

We created top-of-funnel marketing pages

In collaboration with these community managers, as well as internal brand, business and Creative teams, we focused on communicating benefits that most resonated with our user base based on our research

We designed a cross-platform participant experience

The platform enabled users to track activity, share progress, and support one another, on web and mobile apps. A profile (see the 2 screenshots to the right) was an important tool for helping users get to know each other.

We iterated, adding tools to help community managers connect

We wanted to give community managers various ways to engage with their communities. For instance, many of them wanted to talk live to their users at key moments, as a way to better motivate, connect, and sell products.

So we launched a live video feature on the web and mobile apps, and my team designed the whole lifecycle of the video, including the pre-, during and post-states.

The results

After the redesign, there was a +250% increase in total active groups and +160% increase in unique users, compared to the prior product. NPS also rose significantly, from -20 to 50.

Post-launch, we followed an aggressive roadmap over several years, adding high-demand features and optimizing based on analytics.

To date, over 6 million people have used the platform and a half million groups have been created.

I’d love to hear from you

Email me at andrewturrell@gmail.com to chat about a role or project. I’m open to full-time or freelance.