Understandingthe challenge
Industry
- Health & wellbeing
- Education
- Not-for-profit
Platform
- Mobile (iOS & Android)
- Web
Services
- Discovery
- Brand & UX
- Mobile development
- Web development
- Analytics
- Commercial strategy
Go Well is a not-for-profit with a simple mission: help people move more in the places they live, learn and work. Trails is one of the ways they do it. Mark out a route, put a QR code at each stop, and people follow it on their phones, answering questions and scoring points as they go.
Go Well had already proved the idea worked, with an early version built on WordPress. It did the job, but it had a low ceiling. Only the Go Well team could build a trail, so every new one was work for them and there was no real way to scale. It captured almost no data, so a school or a funder could see that people had taken part but not how much or to what effect. And it needed a live connection, which is the one thing you cannot count on halfway round a park.
On top of that, the funding behind it was time-limited. Go Well needed a version that could grow well beyond a handful of sites and, in time, stand on its own.
We took the idea Go Well had proved and built it properly: one platform with two front doors. A native app on iOS and Android for the people out on the trail, and a web tool for the people creating them. The change that matters most is self-service. Go Well, and now the schools and groups using it, build and manage their own trails from templates, so the product can spread without a bottleneck.
The app caches what it needs and keeps working out of signal, then syncs when it is back. An analytics layer records participation and engagement, so a school or a public-health team can see what happened and evidence it. We shaped the brand and the experience so it feels right to the children and communities using it, and delivered the whole thing against Innovate UK’s milestones.
We were able to demo the system and the app to our senior leadership team, and they were really impressed, in particular with the functionality, simplicity and speed of the system.
A product, and a plan to sustain it
The part we are most proud of is not only that it shipped. It is that it was built to keep going. We mapped a route to market with schools first, a subscription price designed to fit a school budget, and a phased way to grow from a local start rather than a hopeful forecast. That covers not only how to build it but how to make it pay for itself once the grant funding ends.
That is the difference between handing over an app and handing over something that lasts. Underneath all of it is a plainly good purpose: children moving more at breaktime, communities out walking a route together.
Two front doors
A native mobile app for participants and a self-service web back-end for the organisations running trails, on one platform.
Works offline
Trails cache to the device and sync when signal returns, so they keep working outdoors and in low-signal places.
Built to last
Alongside the build we produced a full commercial model and scaling roadmap: who to reach first, how to price it for schools, and how the running costs behave as it grows.
Go Well had proved the idea worked. Our job was to turn it into something that could scale, run offline in the middle of a field, show its own impact and, in time, pay for itself. It is the kind of work we most like doing, real technology used by real people for a plainly good reason.
