Everyday Active Behaviour Change Website
Inspirational website with the objective of making physical activity and exercise accessible to all.
Promoting Practical and Inspiring Active Lifestyles Ideas
Exercise can be tricky to fit in with hectic family schedules and muscle-filled gyms and competitive sports aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Other citizens are aware of the importance of physical activity for their health, but simply don’t know where to start.
The Kent Sport and Physical Activity Service needed an engaging new website to promote practical and inspiring exercise ideas to citizens with busy lives and to those for whom physical activity can seem daunting or overly competitive
Tackling the Public Health Challenge
Kent Sport chose Cyber Media to help tackle this challenge, following a competitive process where we were selected on the strength of our expertise supporting public health initiatives.
The website’s main objectives were:
- Allow self-motivated users to explore activities and make decisions
- Allow the website to be used by practitioners, in consultation with a citizen, to explore, tag and recommend articles to read, and activities to try
- Empower local volunteers to take control of local content for specific regions
Physical Activity Behaviour Change
Our project starting point was to analyse the findings of a detailed regional survey undertaken by a physical activity engagement specialist.
The survey had revealed that the language and presentation of physical activity offers is fundamentally important and that activity means different things to different people. For example, for older citizens, the social aspect is frequently the most important.
The survey had also identified that the majority of those interviewed were not familiar with the localised Kent Everyday Active campaign and found its existing online profile on the Kent Sport website difficult to find.
We used the survey’s findings as the foundation for a User-Experience Design process and undertook our research to identify examples of design best practice.
Nurturing the Everyday Active Brand
From here, we worked in close collaboration with Kent Sport’s passionate team to iterate, nurture, and widen the Everyday Active brand. A bright and bold palette was chosen to create a design that is friendly, non-judgemental and approachable.
As part of the project we also worked extensively on planning engaging language with a positive and conversational style that’s motivational, non-judgmental, and easy to understand.
We carefully planned a cohesive website architecture that’s easy to explore by citizens and enriched the design with bespoke iconography to add interest and further enhance the friendly and welcoming look and feel.
Everyday Active Target Audience
The homepage’s header area showcases Kent Sport’s video footage of a broad range of activities and participants which the target audience can identify with.
We took care to ensure citizens aren’t overwhelmed by information on the homepage and instead the citizen is prompted to choose an activity to explore first.
In all there are 8 activity types available – including home and solo activities which are perfect for those who struggle to find time for traditional sports and for those with mobility problems. Upon making their selection, the citizen is taken to the landing page for their chosen activity.
Physical Activity Help and Guidance
Each landing page promotes the health, wellbeing and social benefits of the selected activity and provides the citizen with a simple guide to getting started.
There’s also a range of top tips, suggestions and opportunities related to the activity for the citizen to explore. To aid this process we created a powerful – yet easy to use – filter tool to enable citizens to tailor the articles presented in accord with their personal preferences and time to spare.
Inspiring Local Content
We also developed a versatile template for Kent Sport to showcase the broad range of inspiring case studies of real people and their experiences. The case studies are an effective feature to demonstrate that exercise and physical activity can be enjoyed by people of all backgrounds and abilities – including those with significant health challenges.
The project was completed with the implementation of local pages for different communities in Kent. The local pages are a highly effective way to convey to citizens that activities are readily available nearby and easily accessible. Each local page also empowers Local Community Representatives to introduce themselves, together with the ability for citizens to reach out to them for help and support accessing local activities.
The Results
The new Everyday Active website is a bright, bold and welcoming resource with inspiring ideas for simple, easily accessible activities that enhance physical and mental wellbeing.
The website successfully addresses misconceptions that physical activity has to be time-consuming and competitive through engaging promotion of practical ideas that can be enjoyed by people of all abilities and fit in with busy lives and family demands.