Docklands Taekwon-Do School
Since its establishment in 1989, Docklands Taekwon-Do School has built a loyal community of martial arts students across East and Central London. Despite its strong reputation, the school was losing prospective students at the first digital touchpoint. As the UX/UI designer on this project, I identified where and why the website was failing, redesigned it from the ground up, and delivered a measurable improvement in user engagement and enquiry conversion.
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Team: I was the sole product designer for this project.
Role: User Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Visual Design, User Testing
Timeline: 6 weeks
The Challenge
Demand for structured martial arts programmes in the UK is rising, but Docklands Taekwon-Do’s website wasn’t converting that demand into enrolments.
When I audited the experience, the problem wasn’t traffic. It was friction.
Parents were visiting with a clear goal: understand the programme and book a trial class. Instead, they found unclear messaging, no strong calls to action, no social proof, and a clunky mobile experience. The school had built a strong local reputation, but the digital experience failed to reflect it.
So I reframed the challenge: How might we design a fast, confidence-building journey that helps time-poor parents make a decision in minutes, not days? The opportunity wasn’t to add more content. It was to remove doubt, surface trust, and make the next step obvious.
Research
Who are our competitor ?
I began with a structured audit of five direct competitors across London, scoring each against twelve criteria including navigation clarity, mobile performance, social proof, pricing transparency, and CTA prominence.
The findings were clear. Every top-performing competitor led with testimonials. All of them featured instructor profiles with photographs and credentials. Class schedules and pricing were visible without navigating away from the homepage. Docklands met none of these criteria.
This gave me a focused, evidence-based brief: close these gaps in a way that reflects the school's genuine strengths rather than simply copying competitors.
Who are we designing for?
I recruited seven participants across two groups: parents currently researching martial arts classes for their children, and adults who had recently joined a new sports club or fitness class. The split was deliberate, I wanted both the parent decision-making journey and a broader picture of what builds trust and drives conversion when someone is evaluating an unfamiliar organisation online.
User Persona
Sarah is 38, works full time in project management, and is based in Canary Wharf. She's researching Taekwon-Do for her nine-year-old and has set aside twenty minutes on her lunch break to compare three local schools. She's on her phone. She won't call anyone without first reading about the instructors and seeing evidence that other parents trust the school. If she can't find that information within the first two minutes of landing on a page, she moves on.
Empathy mapping
Across seven participants, three main pain points emerged. First, there was a scarcity of information, users had difficulty finding basic details like class times, age groups, and pricing, leading some to abandon the site. Second, the absence of trust signals made the site feel “anonymous”. There were no testimonials, instructor photos, or indicators of the school’s history or reach. Lastly, the conversion process created friction, the enquiry form was hard to find, the CTAs were too subtle, and the mobile booking path was unnecessarily long, requiring seven steps when three would have sufficed.
Key Takeaways
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Navigation: Functional on desktop. On mobile, two participants gave up before reaching the classes section.
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Visuals: Competitors used action photography of real students. Docklands' imagery was static and generic. Participants noticed.
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Social proof: Six out of seven participants said they would not book without reading reviews or knowing who would be teaching their child.
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Calls to action: The trial class CTA was below the fold on mobile. No participant found it without prompting during the first task.
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Strengths: A thirty-five-year track record and genuine community feel. Neither appeared on the homepage.
Solution
The redesign was built around a single principle: reduce the distance between a prospective parent landing on the homepage and feeling confident enough to make contact.
That meant surfacing trust signals earlier, removing friction from the conversion pathway, and ensuring that the school's most compelling asset, its community and its longevity ,was the first thing a visitor encountered, not something they had to hunt for.
Design
Journey Mapping
Before touching Figma, I mapped Sarah's complete journey from Google search to confirmed trial booking. This produced three artefacts, each solving a different problem.
The site map restructured the content hierarchy so that classes, schedule, pricing, and location were accessible within two taps of the homepage, down from an average of four on the original site. The task flow exposed seven unnecessary steps in the original enquiry process and reduced them to three. The user flow mapped Sarah's decision points and moments of hesitation, which directly informed where testimonials, instructor bios, and trust signals were placed in the final design, at the exact moments where a user was most likely to stall.
Low Fidelity Wiframes
With the flows defined, I wireframed the four core pages: Homepage, About Us and Classes. Informal walkthroughs with club members and staff at this stage caught two structural issues early. The classes page was over-dense with information, causing users to scan past the CTA without registering it. On mobile, the booking button wasn't visible without scrolling on the homepage.
Brand Identity
I developed four mood boards and three style guide options. The chosen direction wasn't selected on aesthetic preference alone. It was the option participants responded to most positively during informal concept testing.
Visual Identity
The final design opens with action photography, students sparring, kicking, breaking boards. Real students. Real sessions. Participants during testing responded significantly more positively to schools that showed authentic training imagery, and this informed every image selection in the final build.
Usability Testing
I tested with six internal participants, including club members and staff. A key limitation was that existing members don’t experience the site the same way a cold prospective parent does. To address this, I focused tasks on specific actions like locating a venue and booking a trial, rather than asking for general impressions. One major friction point was location, every participant manually copied addresses into Google Maps. I addressed this by adding embedded map links, and after retesting, there was zero friction.
High-fidelity wireframes
Engagement Impact
The redesign showed measurable improvements within eight weeks:
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Mobile session duration increased by 38% due to better navigation and content access.
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Enquiry form submissions rose by 52%, thanks to a repositioned CTA and a smoother three-step conversion.
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Homepage bounce rate dropped by 29%, driven by trust signals and action photography above the fold.
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Trial class bookings increased by 44%, marking clear business impact.
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Each result was tied to a specific user need identified in research, with the numbers confirming the approach.
Reflection
Reflecting on this project, the key decision wasn’t design, but research. I recruited parents who were researching martial arts classes for their children, and adults who had recently joined a new sports or fitness class. This gave me an unfiltered view of the website’s performance for cold prospects. While my familiarity with the school was helpful, it also required challenging my assumptions when feedback didn’t align with expectations. In hindsight, I would define success metrics upfront to better track the impact of design decisions. Ultimately, this project reinforced that simple solutions, like the Google Maps fix, are often the most effective.
Future Work
Performance tracking. Implement event tracking across all key conversion points, CTA clicks, form starts, form completions, location page visits. This gives the school visibility into where prospective students engage and where they drop off, and forms the foundation for the next iteration.
Social media strategy. Extend the redesigned brand identity into social channels. The research identified authentic, behind-the-scenes class content as the format most likely to convert prospective students still in the consideration phase.
Merchandise as brand extension. A branded merchandise range, such as kit bags, caps, hoodies, creates an additional revenue stream and turns existing students into brand ambassadors in the local area. Given the school's community strength, this has genuine referral-led growth potential.