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  • Torke Online Academy

    The Brief: Help Torke Cycling deliver an online learning experience that will add value to the existing users of their service and potentially reach new customers too!


    Watch this case study

The Big Question

Will Our Customers Buy Online Training From Us?

This was the question being asked by Tony and Gillian at Torke Cycling, a small boutique bicycle fitting brand based in the West of England!

Torke Cycling currently offer in-person training to future bicycle fitters. They have Torke accredited fitters in cities all over the world who also train up new recruits. They believe that their success is due, in part, to the face-to-face, personal nature of their training but would also like to offer training to customers via online courses without endangering their primary focus, the in-person training that they offer.

In order to help them explore who they were targeting and what they could target them with. I offered to facilitate a Design Sprint to help them build a prototype of their product concept and test it with their existing users.



The Approach

The Design Sprint Process for the uninitiated!

Developed at Google Ventures, Design Sprints are a structured way of taking a problem and using the collective knowledge of your team to design a solution, prototype that solution and test it with real people… All in the space of 4 days!

It allows you to validate and test your idea before committing to expensive development work.

Day 1 - Discover & Conceptualise

The whole team, in a room, using structured exercises to get a solid understanding of the product's users, problems and your goal.

Day 2 - Decide & Define

The whole team back in the room, again, using structured exercises to choose a concept and develop it into an idea with a purpose.

Day 3 - Prototype

Those who can, help create a clickable prototype that will be put in front of real users to test our concept out.

Day 4 - Test

The team will watch via video link and make notes as an interviewer asks 5 testers to complete tasks and answer questions about the prototype.

Day 1

Discover & Conceptualise

The Morning

The morning of day 1 was spent exploring the Torke Cycling Business, current clients, current problems and ideas for achieving the goal of offering online training as a complementary service to Torke clients.

We used the standard Design Sprint 2.0 format* throughout the sprint so the morning of day one involved our Expert Interviews, Long Term Goals & Sprint Questions and Mapping exercises where we defined the following:

How Might We...

  • Make the offering scalable and remote?
  • Show that Torke is a legitimate source of training?
  • Grow the number of people able to deliver in-person training?

Sprint Questions

  • Can we demonstrate the Torke is a legitimate training option?
  • Can we convince people to pay for online training?

Long Term Goal

  • To have an online curriculum that generates income independently and promotes the in-person training.

Despite the fact that our sprint was meant to focus on delivering a digital training platform, the vast majority of the findings from the morning session highlighted that the main purpose of the project was to legitimise and support the current Torke offering rather than just adding a new revenue stream to the business. This was a really useful insight for designing a solution that wasn't just another off-the-shelf training library.

* If you are unfamiliar with the specific exercises that go into a design sprint, there is a great playlist from AJ&Smart that you can see here

The Afternoon

The afternoon of day 1 was spent producing solutions. We each spent time looking at existing products that might provide inspiration to us and sketching a concept that we would present to the group the following day, our "pitch" for achieving the Long Term Goal.

Day 2

Decide & Define

The Morning

We spent the morning deciding the direction we would take with our product. As per a "by the book" design sprint, the tasks undertaken to choose and refine the concept that we would move forward with were:

  • The Gallery
  • Speed Critiques
  • Straw Poll
  • Supervote

The Decision

The Torke Online Academy concept was chosen as it would allow us to compare sentiment toward 3 different product offerings, a short, low cost, "What is Bike Fitting" course, a more comprehensive "How To Bike Fit" course and the current "In-Person" offering:

chosen Concept

It also had the advantage of giving very clear Product Market Fit indicators and allowed the team to get a clear idea of what a "successful Test" would look like.

The Afternoon

We spent the afternoon discussing and producing wireframes for all of the screens that would be required in our prototype to test our concept with test users.

  • Home Screen
    Home Screen
  • What is Bike Fitting? Screen
  • How To Bike Fit Screen
  • In-Person Training Screen
  • Purchase Course Screen
  • Course 1 Purchase Confirmation Screen
  • Course 2 Purchase Confirmation Screen
  • Take Your Course/Graduate Screen
  • Completion Screen

Day 3

Prototyping

Day 3 was spent Prototyping the concept defined during the previous day. Myself and a Product Manager worked together to produce the screens as realistically as possible.

We built our prototype in Adobe XD and used content gathered from the previous sessions as well as content from the existing Torke Cycling website to produce a clickable prototype that can be seen in the video below:

Day 4

Testing

Positive results and some interesting insights

The user testing took place with a group of new Torke Cycling customers that had just signed up for an in-person course. The insights gathered from this study were really positive but threw up a suprising observation for 2 out of the 5 test-subjects.

Feedback summary:

  • 5 out of the 5 testers would almost certainly pay for supplementary training that could be undertaken in preparation of an in-person course.
  • 3 out of the 5 testers said that they would take an online course instead of an in person course if it were available.
  • 2 out of the 5 testers said that the reason that they came to Torke is due to the reputation of their in-person courses and they would never take an online-only course.

The feedback gathered suggested that the plan to target customers of the in-person training was a good one but we were conscious of the fact that our test subjects would be biased towards in-person training due to the fact that they had already paid for an in-person training course from Torke.

These results were positive enough for Torke cycling to decide to develop the idea further and they are currently in the process of developing the content of the courses that will be offered on the Torke Training Academy.

But What About Online-Only Training?

It had been highlighted that the skewed test subject demographic might mean that there is actually more appetite for online-only training than suggested by our testing. This was acknowledged by Torke Cycling and another round of testing is set to take place in 2020. However, they currently want to focus on bolstering their niche as an in-person training provider before thinking about delivering a fully online curriculum. This is, in part, due to capacity (they believe that an online-only course will need to be considerably more comprehensive and the cost of delivering this would be too great) and in part due to Torke wanting to remain a premium service that can only be experienced in-person.

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