Your personal swim coach

Motivating expats to overcome their fear of water and learn how to swim

Your Personal Swim Coach (YPSC) is a swim school in 6 cities in The Netherlands with 19 professional coaches. Their target audience is international adults living in the Netherlands. Within their target audience YPSC identified 2 main segments:

  • Professional expats with high demands and expectations considering service.
  • Non native citizens with a fear of water. Only after overcoming lots of internal resistance and shame they dare to start going to swim class.

Website visitors are getting lost

The new website structure is constructed from insights that came out of the UX research: competitor research, stakeholder interviews and user recordings. I discuss a few of these insights (in Dutch) in the video.

On the previous site the information about the different types of lessons, locations and prices was extremely scattered. In user recordings I saw people get lost.

To make it more clear which types of classes are available, I separated the private lessons from the regular classes and gave those a prominent place in the navigation. I clustered the rest of the classes into 2 main categories to fit the main customer journeys:

  • New to swimming (orientating users)
  • Swimming classes (selecting users)

The SEO-power of the blog

YPSC had a few exceptional spikes in their top 10 search queries considering the words ‘float’ or ‘floating’. The people who used these search words in Google all landed on the “floating in swimming” blog page.

In 2020 this blog article was the landing page for over more than 19.000 visitors. But: almost 94% of them immediately bounced. Further investigation showed that almost all of those users had a foreign IP and only came to consume the information in that specific article (without real interest in or the potential to subscribe to swimming classes in The Netherlands).

So within these visitors there won’t be many potential customers but we’re happy with these high visitor numbers because they are positive for the website SEO. But then again, the high bounce rate is harmful for the SEO ranking. That’s why I created the sub-goal to lower the bounce on the popular blog pages.

YPSC wireframes
YPSC menu

Lower bounce rates, more unique visitors and more subscriptions!

By placing other relevant articles to read at the bottom of blog pages their bounce rate is decreased by 6% since february 2021. And because the Homepage and Swimming classes pages now offer direct access to the different locations (where the logical next step is to actually book a trial lesson) we more than doubled the amount of unique pageviews on those pages and lowered their bounce rate from 57,35% to 35,82%.

During the development phase I made sure that we kept the important old URL’s intact. Because of this and by putting more emphasis on locations and swim levels throughout the website (in texts), we also see an enormous increase in unique visitors since we went live in january 2021.

And because there is now more emphasis on the private lessons, YPSC has seen a huge increase in these types of subsriptions. This validated that a certain target audience has a want/need for this and it brought the company a nice revenue increase.

The project process

I executed this project in collaboration with Raevels.nl. The steps we took were:

  • Competitor and e-commerce best practices research
  • Defining the content / storytelling and structure framework.
  • UX design (mobile and desktop wireframes)
  • UI design
  • Website development (in WordPress – Divi and Woocommerce) + hosting

Raevels and UX studio.online join forces to help businesses successfully bring a new product to market or stay ahead of their competition with an online re-design. Stay relevant by improving your brand strategy, business positioning, concept strategy and digital strategy.

 We look beyond the user journey to discover new and creative ways to make a positive impact on your customer. Get in touch to see what we can do for your company.

Other UX projects

Let's talk about UX

Set up a free online call

Let's talk
About UX

Set up a free online call