Connecting the digital and real-world member experience

Context

David Lloyd Clubs is a premium health, fitness and social club group. I have led digital experience work with them at programme level across an evolving portfolio of member journeys. The relationship began with web experience work and expanded across club discovery, food and drink, joining and onboarding, member experience, and longer-term app and digital product strategy.

From individual journeys to connected experience

My role has been to maintain the strategic thread across initiatives: connecting member needs, commercial priorities, digital products and the real-world club experience, rather than treating web, app and physical touchpoints as separate problems that happen to share a logo.

An example: food and drink

A fragmented in-club ordering journey was redesigned through member research, information architecture, testing and iterative design. Research took place with real members in real club environments, which meant we could understand not simply whether an interface was usable, but the context people were actually trying to use it in - mid-swim, with children, between classes. The resulting work improved the experience and gave the team a foundation for continued optimisation.

Moving upstream

The work developed beyond optimisation and delivery into longer-term product and experience strategy: future-facing exploration of how the digital experience could evolve alongside changing member expectations and emerging technology.

Strategic themes explored

• Personalisation
• Wellbeing
• Community and belonging
• Connected digital and physical experiences
• Onboarding
• Emerging technology and AI
• The relationship between digital products and the wider premium member experience

Making future strategy tangible

Future-facing work combined market and comparator research, member insight, collaborative ideation, future-back thinking, concept development, prototyping, qualitative and quantitative research, experimentation, commercial thinking and senior stakeholder engagement. The purpose was not technology theatre. It was to make possible futures tangible enough to research, challenge, prioritise and decide on.

My role

• Programme direction and strategic framing
• Senior stakeholder engagement
• Connecting separate workstreams into a coherent member experience
• Shaping briefs rather than simply responding to requirements
• Directing multidisciplinary design and research teams
• Connecting experience strategy to commercial objectives
• Working alongside product and technology partners
• Moving conversations from delivery problems towards product and experience strategy

Results and evidence

This is a live client relationship, so performance figures, internal research findings and future concepts are deliberately not published here. The story worth telling is structural: individual digital projects became a broader experience relationship, because delivery created evidence and trust, and that trust created permission to tackle bigger product and business questions.

Lessons and continuing questions

Continuity is an underrated design capability. Most experience problems in a multi-touchpoint business are caused by nobody being accountable for the space between the projects.