David Lloyd Clubs

David Lloyd Clubs – Mobile app

“I can honestly say, ‘no other project team would have been able to do such a fantastic job.”

Amy Kerr, Project Manager

The Challenge

To create a bespoke mobile app for David Lloyd Clubs members to book exercise classes and tennis courts.

The app needed to be compatible with both Android and iOS platforms and should aim to “Feel like an app” (rather than just a mobile web experience). The other key requirements were to deliver an engaging user-experience with smooth transitions whilst supporting a high load level.

David Lloyd Clubs wanted to launch the app before their busy September season to attract new customers, but they also understood that their specification was too fully-featured to be delivered by this deadline. A crucial challenge for Softwire was therefore to develop a minimum viable product that we were sure we could complete in time and build on later.

Our Solution

We took a phased approach and broke the project down, allowing us to get the MVP out as fast as possible.

We recommended PhoneGap for the app. PhoneGap combines familiar responsive web technologies with access to native phone features, so that a single application can rapidly be built once to run on multiple platforms. In other words, you don’t have to write separate native applications for Android and iOS phones.

Although the use of PhoneGap was effective in the rapid development of the application, we still wanted it to “feel like an app, not like a website.” So, we combined all the code into the initial download – that way, all our pages load instantly and the app provides a good user experience even when offline.

But we still needed to deliver the MVP on time. We split the app into as many small components as we could so that we could work on everything at once. This modular approach had the additional benefit of making it easy to add additional features. We supported the app with a comprehensive regression test suite.