Role
Lead Product Designer
Client
Virgin Active
Duration, Year
3weeks, 2025
Services
Product Design (UX/UI)
Design Strategy
User Flow Mapping
Rapid Prototyping
Contributors
1 Designer (me), 1 Solution Architect, 1 VA Stakeholder
Virgin Active’s Club-V program supports childcare booking through the mobile app, but the booking logic was originally designed for a single child. As more parents enrolled multiple children into different programs, the experience began to break. Parents were repeating the entire five-step booking process for each child, often while multitasking at home or rushing into the gym. The system also lacked clear visibility of overlapping availability, making it hard to secure spots for more than one child.
Virgin Active's Club-V program supports childcare booking through the mobile app, but the booking logic was originally designed for a single child. As more parents enrolled multiple children across different programs, the experience began to break. Parents were repeating the entire five-step booking process for each child — often while multitasking at home or rushing into the gym. The system lacked clear visibility of overlapping availability, making it hard to secure spots for more than one child at once.
My task was to redesign the booking experience within a tight three-week window, working within Virgin Active's existing design system and mobile patterns, to support:
Multi-child families
Real-time capacity and availability
Fast mobile decision making
Reuse of existing design system components and booking patterns
Babies and Toddlz: 6 weeks - 2 years
Active kids: 3-12 years
To understand the current experience, I mapped the as-is Creche booking flow. This revealed technical dependencies, redundant steps, and significant user frustration.
Key issue identified:
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Parents needed a faster, clearer, and more consolidated booking experience. One that supported multiple children, reduced cognitive load, and allowed them to compare availability across programs at a glance.
This directly shaped the next step: defining the user persona and their goals.
Behaviours across contexts:
Night before: Plans the next day’s gym session and books while multitasking at home.
A few days ahead: Schedules for the week and wants to see which days still have availability.
Same-day booking: Books while commuting or at reception, often under time pressure.
Based on the persona and pain points, I defined four design goals for the new experience:
Rather than moving straight to Figma, I used Claude to synthesise the problem framing into a structured PRD — covering problem statement, user goals, technical constraints, success criteria, and MVP scope. This gave the team a shared brief before any design decisions were made and helped me identify edge cases (single-child households, fully booked states) that might otherwise surface late in the process.
From there, I used the PRD to write a Figma Make prompt and generate an early prototype within hours. This let me visualise the booking logic, information hierarchy, and key actions quickly — and stress-test the flow with the solution architect and internal design team before committing to high-fidelity screens.
The initial version helped the team quickly understand the structure but lacked Virgin-specific logic. After reviewing with the solution architect and internal design team, we agreed to refine the flow further.
Key insights from the workshop:
Opportunities to align the creche flow with the existing gym class booking pattern
The need for two-step segmentation instead of a single long flow
A requirement for colour-coded capacity states (green, yellow, red)
System constraints around capacity per program (Babies and Toddlez, Active Kids)
I also reviewed competitor booking flows across Fitness, childcare, and appointment-based apps — iFIT, Lane Cove, One Playground, Anytime Fitness, and Beatty Park Leisure Centre — to ensure the new experience followed familiar mobile mental models. Most provided solid single-child flows but none supported multi-child selection or dual-program capacity.
These insights became the foundation for the improved design.
Virgin Active had an existing design system, but it did not fully support multi-child scenarios. I reused as much as possible to ensure consistency, then extended it where necessary.
Reused components
Typography and colour palette
Button hierarchy
Form fields and input patterns
Calendar structure
Navigation patterns from existing class booking
New or evolved components
Child selection cards: Multi-select, age tags, program labels.
Dual-program availability module: Shows capacity for both Babies and Toddlez and Active Kids.
Colour-coded availability indicators: Green, yellow, red for instant visual clarity.
Booking summary strip: Keeps selected children visible.
Two-step segmentation: Mobile-friendly, reduces scrolling.
This approach ensured the new flow felt native to the app while addressing unique creche booking needs.
Final Design Solution
Scenario 1: Multi-child booking Users select multiple children and see program availability in 15-minute increments to identify overlapping times.
Multi-select children in one view (book two or more)
Capacity visibility per date (colour-coded)
15-minute intervals to align across age groups
Booking summary before confirmation
Scenario 2: Single-child booking A simplified version that maintains consistency with the overall pattern.
Simplified layout for parents booking one child
Consistent colour indicators
Reusable UI pattern for scalability
Scenario 3: One-child household (auto-selected) The system pre-selects the only child, shortening the flow.
Automatically selects the only registered child
Skips unnecessary steps and accelerates completion
Fully booked state handled gracefully
The redesigned flow reduced unnecessary steps, improved visibility of availability, and allowed parents to book multiple children within one guided journey. The Virgin Active team approved the design in the first presentation and moved it directly to development without requesting changes.
As the work was handed over prior to release, I delivered annotated screens, UI states, and interaction logic to support implementation and QA, with clear points to measure task completion and drop-off once instrumented.
This project highlighted the importance of:
The final solution balanced speed, usability, and technical feasibility while maintaining a native feel inside the existing Virgin Active mobile ecosystem.
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