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The last two years have changed the way people look at fitness. While a lot of internet searches were around banana bread recipes and Dalgona coffee, there were simultaneous searches on health, weight loss and diets. Right when the first lockdown started according to a Statista survey, mobile apps in the health and fitness category saw a spike in usage. 71 percent of respondents looked up ‘Six pack abs in 28 days’ while many others looked for home workouts and fitness apps.

This is when Curefit, known for their group workout centres Cult, also started working aggressively on home workouts and started thinking of adding new elements to their fitness app that were primarily being used for booking Cult classes or offering food and activewear.

Shriya Malpani, Head of Design at Curefit tells Storyboard18 how Lights Out Studio brought a 360 degree change in design to amplify customer experience and bring overall changes to the look and feel of the brand.

She talks about the importance of design and how it is an important tool for a modern marketer especially those who deal with app based services.

Read on.

Why did you think of changing the look and feel of your app? Was this something that was on the cards for the brand? Or is this part of any new marketing campaign?

In the last 5 years Cult’s products have expanded from group fitness classes to gyms, online workouts, sports, mental health, nutrition, fitness gear and more. And as we were expanding we realised that it was becoming harder each day in maintaining consistency in experience and the end user experience was getting impacted because of the chaotic look and feel.

In March 2021, we set a vision for ourselves that in the next 2 years we want to join the league of world’s best apps and we called it Design+. This vision led us to building a robust design language which would allow us to create consistent yet highly differentiated user experience.

As a part of this project we deep dived to understand what our members liked about Cult and how they remembered the brand. There was a strong recall for our bold black facades of cult centres, dark yet vibrant and energetic in-center experience. With the new look and feel we wanted to extend the similar recall on the app.

How do you think Lights Out helped you and why did you think getting external help is better than in-house design operations?

Our new design language, Aurora, was conceptualised and designed by our in-house team. Lights Out came as a knight in shining armour who helped us scale the concept across different flows of the app. They understood our vision and honestly all we wanted was a partner who shared our values and ideology in design.

External teams can add immense value when you are working on projects that are not ongoing in nature but require deep expertise. Lights Out adds that lens of an expert partner in crime for us, across our application.

Our internal teams focus on more core aspects of user experience and usability across different products, So when it came to implementation of Aurora which was a time sensitive project and required best in class UI and visual expertise we decided to go with Lights Out.

The project took us more than a year with dedicated effort from both our in-house teams as well as Lights Out.

<img class="alignnone wp-image-1715 size-full" src="https://images.storyboard18.com/storyboard18/IMG_3963.jpg" alt="" width="577" height="788" />

With people back on the roads and in gyms, who are the people who are still using your app? Other than booking workout classes, what are the other functions of the app that are widely used?

Class and gym session booking/checking is the most used function. Followed by joining live and interactive digital classes. Followed by AI based workout plans that users use in gyms. Commerce comes next with our cult sport brand followed by commerce of fitness packs that range from weight loss consultations, therapy, diagnostics to doctor consultations.

The idea behind Cult was a huge disruption in the fitness space but what next? What is the next narrative you are trying to build?

Disruption is by no yardstick complete. India fitness penetration is 1-2 percent as compared to 15 percent in the US and much higher in Europe. We have to make fitness and health easy and enjoyable for hundreds of millions of Indians in a relatable way. We want to make sure that anyway an Indian thinks of consuming fitness, whether it's sports, gyms, walking, swimming, dancing, their first choice is a Cult offering.

With a redesigned interface, what is the increase in engagement and retention you are expecting?

We have seen a clear correlation between how many workouts someone does in a month and retention rates. While Cult’s retention rates are more than double than that of the rest of the industry. we feel we can still reach higher numbers. We aim to do this by increasing active workouts by our members by 50 percent.

What is the increase in new customer acquisition that the new design could potentially help with?

With the launch of the new design language we saw a 300 percent increase in engagement of our key app properties. Cutlass trials went up by 12 percent and acquisition increased by a steady 5 percent. One of the biggest benefits is that we now have a fully coded design system which allows us to ship new products and enhancements at a significantly faster pace. At the same time maintaining a high level of consistency.

SHRIYA MALPANI