Pilates On Tap

AT A GLANCE

• Sector: Fitness, health and wellness
• Platforms: iOS and Android
• What we did: App design and development — UX and UI design for both platforms, onboarding design, session-builder design and the app icon
• Where it started: A brief from Sarah Manners, a British actress who qualified as a Pilates instructor in 2014 after her own postural deviations led her to a Pilates class
• Where it shipped: Live on iOS and Android after 6+ months of development, with launch coverage in LUXLife Magazine and The London Magazine

THE CHALLENGE

Online Pilates asks the member to fit themselves to the class. You pick a pre-recorded video of a fixed length, hope it covers the area you actually want to work on, and accept whatever level the instructor pitched it at. The alternative — algorithmic fitness apps — solves the personalisation problem by removing the instructor altogether and putting a computer-generated figure on screen. Sarah wanted neither. Her brief was to revolutionise the online Pilates space: classes tailored to skill, level, time schedule and fitness goals, still taught by a real-life instructor.

That framing set the hard design problem. If every class is assembled on demand from a library of instructor-filmed video segments, the app has to know enough about a member to build the right class — and it has to learn that before the first session, because a personalisation engine that needs three workouts of behaviour to become useful will lose most people at workout one. So the design had to gather focus areas, ability and available time in the first minutes after download, then immediately spend that information on something the member can see.

The second problem is coherence. A class stitched together from separate clips can easily feel like a playlist rather than a session. The interface had to make an assembled class read as one continuous, instructor-led workout.

WHAT WE DESIGNED

A one-question-per-screen onboarding sequence. Rather than a single long preferences form, onboarding is a stepped set of screens that each ask one thing — what you want to work on, your level, how long you have. The screens on this page are numbered by question step, and the answers are not stored for later: they are the direct inputs to the first generated class, so a new member reaches a session built for them on day one.

A session builder driven by two inputs. The core interaction is deliberately narrow: tell the app what you want to work on and how long you want to work out for, and it conjures up a bespoke class. Keeping the commitment to two decisions is what makes the app usable on a weekday morning rather than something you plan around.

Filtering inside the session library, including mobility. Members can steer a class toward a specific kind of work — mobility, for example — instead of accepting a fixed programme. This is the release valve for the two-input model: it keeps the default fast while still giving returning members precise control.

A video-led session screen. The player is designed around instructor footage, not an avatar or a diagram, because the whole product promise is a qualified instructor rather than a computer-generated figure. Chrome around the video is kept minimal so the class reads as continuous.

A member profile area holding preferences and progress, so the personalisation the member set up during onboarding stays editable as their goals change.

A shared screen-ID system. Every screen carries a prefixed identifier by area — onboarding, session, profile — with numeric IDs. Across a 6+ month build shipping to two platforms, this let design, development and QA reference exactly the same screen without ambiguity.

WHAT SHIPPED

Pilates On Tap launched on iOS and Android after 6+ months of development, and was featured at launch in LUXLife Magazine and The London Magazine. We do not publish download, revenue or rating figures for this project.

FREQUENTLY ASKED

How long does it take to design a fitness app?
Pilates On Tap took 6+ months from start to shipping on iOS and Android, and that is a fair benchmark for an app with generated, personalised sessions rather than a fixed content list. A simpler class-library app is faster; anything that assembles sessions on demand needs the onboarding, the filtering and the player designed together, because they are one system.

What makes fitness app onboarding work?
Two things. Ask one question per screen so a first-time user is never facing a wall of form fields, and spend the answers immediately — the reward for completing onboarding should be a session built from what you just said, not a generic home screen. Getting someone from download to a first completed session is the only onboarding metric that matters.

Do you design for instructors as well as members?
On Pilates On Tap the app itself is member-facing; the instructor’s contribution is the filmed video library that the session builder draws from, so the design work concentrated on the member experience. Where a project genuinely needs two audiences — instructors scheduling and publishing, members booking and training — we design them as separate products that share one content model, because the two roles want opposite things from the same screen.

Related services

Fitness apps live or die on the first week. If people are downloading yours and drifting away before their second session, a free UX audit is the sensible place to start — it looks at onboarding and first-session flow specifically. If the app already exists but the experience has aged around it, we also handle app redesign. There is more on how we work as an app design agency in London, or you can get started.