LMS, Video Subscription and Ecommerce Platform for Olympic-Level and Professional Sports Coaches

This group of Olympic track and field coaches needed help. They have trained over 100 Olympic athletes and coached them to earn 40 Olympic medals, not to mention the myriad professional sports teams that consistently rely on ALTIS to train their coaching staff. Much of the training they provide to other coaches and trainers is delivered online, but they built their digital footprint over time and without an overarching strategy.

That’s how they ended up with three distinct digital properties that weren’t easily extensible and financial reporting that was unreliable. To reach their goals, they needed a platform overhaul to unite their financial systems and a better way to deliver online training materials, a video subscription model, and tickets to in-person events. 

Unifying the look and feel in a single architecture

Three different sites housed the learning management system (LMS), the video subscription service, and the primary marketing site. Because all these elements were in different places, users had to know and use separate logins to access different types of content. The customer service burden alone of supporting the same user base across systems was a major pain point, but the financial reporting was worse. These systems all fed into a single merchant system, but it was impossible to understand user preferences or correlate their behavior and purchase performance.

Having interviewed users and internal stakeholders, our work emphasized understanding the journeys and mental models of those users. We after testing our understanding against the internal team, we decided that segmenting by content delivery method made the most sense, and built a customer journey map with a content strategist and lead developer.

Video UI enhancements

The ALTIS team has an extremely popular video subscription service marketed to track and field athletes and coaches. These videos are primarily low-production recordings of training meetings, follow up conversations with athletes currently training at ALTIS, and guest speakers delivering contemporary research presentations. In spite of the production quality, there is a dedicated audience that consumes this content both on the website and through an app on iOS and Android.

Our information architecture work extended to this platform as well, clarifying the categories of the videos, and creating a more user-friendly interface for watching the videos in the browser. Specific emphasis was placed on encouraging community engagement, which happens in a private Facebook group.

Course launch

All of this work was completed on an extremely tight timeline. In just over four months from the signing of the contract, we were ready to launch the new ALTIS platform, just in time for a new digital course to launch that the education team had been working on for almost a year. This lead to coordinated marketing communications on social media, PPC and email channels. This launch tested a new “scarcity” model for ALTIS, where the course was only available for a limited time. Despite a short-lived technical issue with the server at launch, the new course sold incredibly well, exceeding internal expectations and setting up the model for future launches.