ABOUT

Educating and inspiring British coaches to produce more medal winners

Positioning
UK Sport, partnering with the English Institute of Sport, have created a new initiative aimed at educating and inspiring development managers and coaches. The goal? To produce winning athletes and sportspeople over the next 8-year Olympic cycle. There are two strands to this initiative: one is a series of workshops for a handful of nominated sports professionals, who attend over an 18-month period. The other – open to a wider, still carefully selected audience – is an online quarterly magazine that disseminates the best insight, science and methodologies from the world of sport.

Proposition
We created an online hub to support both strands of the initiative. For the workshops, first we evolved the working title ‘Performance Pathway Programme’ into ‘P3’, and developed a visual identity for the programme. We then created a repository that the attendees have at their disposal, allowing them to download materials from the course, read synopses, watch videos and interact with the speakers. For the online magazine, we designed and built a framework for UK Sport to curate thematic seasonal editions, with articles comprising various media, surveys and image galleries.

Personality
The clean, simple and slick interface was designed as an antidote to the basic and poorly structured portal sites currently available to sports organisations. Particular attention was paid to the user experience to allow easy access to media and resources, while retaining a warm, inviting feel. The hub also allows a number of layout combinations with rich colour palettes to keep issues fresh and varied.

Result
Our aim was to give the participants and journal subscribers a hub that possesses the finesse and care of a consumer-facing site as opposed to a utilitarian internal resource. The success of the magazine has meant it is now oversubscribed, with requests coming in from around the world. Meanwhile, the success of the workshops and the supporting online hub continues with a new cohort of participants starting on their 18-month cycle.

"When we began our collaboration with BEAR, we had hopes of creating an engaging and professional online platform to share ideas with our stakeholders. BEAR have absolutely made that hope a reality. The brand identity, online environment, and associated materials they have created have been extremely well received by our audience. In addition to that, the creativity and passion of the designers at BEAR has made the whole collaboration a very enjoyable experience." Dr Catherine Hesford, Performance Pathway Scientist, UK Sport

BEAR + UK Sport
- Site architecture
- User experience (including wireframes)
- Design
- Web build (partner)