Refiine

AT A GLANCE

• Sector: Sports coaching and fitness
• Platforms: iOS and Android
• What we did: UX design, UI design and an interactive clickable prototype
• Who it serves: both sides of the marketplace — athletes booking coaching, and coaches managing their availability and bookings
• Market: United States
• Timeline: 8 weeks to prototype

The challenge in detail

Refiine had to work for two people whose jobs in the app are almost opposites. Amateur and professional athletes across the US were trying to find a private sports coach through general search engines, with no dependable way to narrow the field by location, by budget, or by whether a coach actually suits their current skill level. A coach who is excellent but two hours away, twice the price, or pitched at a completely different standard is not a useful result.

On the other side sit the coaches, who need something quite different: a clear view of when they are free and control over the bookings coming in. Sessions are not uniform either — a booking can be one-to-one or a group class, and the two behave differently.

The design problem was to serve both sides in one app without either feeling like a bolted-on afterthought, and to do it in a form the client could put in front of investors.

What we designed

We designed Refiine as two complete journeys that meet at the booking.

For athletes, the core flow is discovery to booking: browsing coaches near them, then narrowing by the two filters that actually decide the match — budget and skill level. This was the crux of the brief, so it drove the hierarchy of the browse and coach screens: the information you need to rule a coach in or out comes first, not last. From there the athlete books either an individual session or a group class, with the two routes made distinct early rather than buried behind a single ambiguous “Book” button.

For coaches, the app is a management tool. The coach-side screens cover setting and maintaining availability, and reviewing and managing incoming bookings — the two jobs that determine whether a coach keeps using a marketplace at all.

Because the two audiences need different first screens, the app separates the athlete and coach paths from entry rather than trying to serve both from one dashboard.

The whole thing was designed for iOS and Android and delivered as a clickable prototype, so both journeys could be walked end to end rather than described in a deck.

What shipped

This engagement ran to prototype stage, so there are no download or revenue figures to report, and we will not invent any.

What we delivered, in eight weeks, was a clickable online demo of Refiine for iOS and Android. It demonstrates the athlete journey — discovering coaches nearby and booking private or group lessons — and the coach journey of managing availability and bookings, in a form the client could use to demonstrate the idea to investors and showcase their offering. The prototype was ready for investment conversations.

Frequently asked

How do you design an app with two different user types?

You design each side as its own product first, then decide where they meet. On Refiine the athletes and the coaches share a marketplace but share very few screens: athletes search, compare and book, while coaches set availability and manage what comes in. We map both journeys end to end before drawing a single shared screen, which keeps one side from getting a watered-down version of the other side’s app.

What keeps people engaged with a training app?

The sessions themselves do — the app’s job is to stay out of the way between wanting a session and having one booked. In practice that means being ruthless about the decisions that actually cause drop-off. For Refiine that was matching on budget and skill level, so athletes are not scrolling past coaches they were never going to book, and giving coaches enough control over availability that the bookings they receive are ones they can honour.

How long does it take to design a coaching platform?

Refiine went from brief to a clickable iOS and Android prototype covering both the athlete and coach journeys in eight weeks, which is a fair benchmark for a two-sided prototype of this scope. A prototype is usually the quickest way to get something real in front of investors or test users. Designing a full production build takes longer, and depends mainly on how many features each side of the marketplace needs at launch.