The timetable is not the problem

For about four years I answered the studio phone myself, and the same call came in perhaps three times a week. Somebody would have been on the website. They would have looked at the timetable. And they would ring up and say some version of: I don’t know which one to book.

I used to find this puzzling, because the timetable is right there. Every class is named, timed, and attributed to an instructor. Then one afternoon I read our own timetable as though I had never been in the building, and it said this:

09:30 Reformer Flow · Nadia · 50 min 11:00 Tower & Chair · Ruth · 45 min 17:15 Jump Board · Elin · 45 min

That is complete information and it is completely useless. It tells you what the classes are called. It does not tell you which one will make you feel like an idiot in front of eleven strangers, which is the only question the person ringing up actually has.

What people are really asking

Nobody rings a pilates studio to find out when things are on. They ring to find out whether they will be the worst person in the room. They ring to find out whether the thing in their back means they should not be doing this at all. They ring because a website full of extremely calm photographs has not told them whether it is for people like them.

And the answer exists. It has always existed. It lives in the heads of the four of us and it gets given, correctly and warmly, on the phone: don’t book that one, come to Foundations on Tuesday, Nadia teaches it, everyone in there started in the last six weeks. Thirty seconds. Problem solved.

The failure was never that we did not know the answer. It was that the only way to get it was to ring up — and most people will not ring up. They close the tab. We never find out they were here.

Translation, not information

We started calling this a translation problem, and once you have that phrase it is difficult to stop seeing it. The timetable is written in the studio’s language. The person reading it speaks a completely different one, in which the useful categories are not “Reformer Flow” and “Tower 2” but “I sit down all day and my back hurts” and “I had a baby eight months ago” and “I’m quite fit but I have never done this.”

Nobody has to learn the studio’s language before they are allowed to book. That is our job, not theirs.

So we built the thing that translates

Find your first class asks three questions. Have you done this before. Is anything going on with your body. What do you want from it. Then it names one class, tells you who teaches it and when it runs, and tells you honestly what the fifty minutes will feel like.

Three deliberate decisions, all of which we argued about:

It is not a quiz. There is no score, no percentage, no pilates personality. It routes you and then gets out of the way. A score would be entertainment and we do not need you entertained, we need you in the right room on Tuesday.

There is no email box before the answer. We discussed putting one in, because of course we did — every marketing article ever written would tell us to. But the entire point of the thing is to be useful to a stranger who owes us nothing. Charging them an email address for thirty seconds of advice we would give free on the phone would poison it.

Two answers refuse to give you a class at all. If you tell it you are pregnant or postnatal, or coming back from an injury, it stops and points you at a conversation. It cannot be argued out of this. It was the first thing we built and it is the only part I would not compromise on — the harm from routing a postnatal beginner into Jump Board is not symmetrical with the inconvenience of asking somebody to have a conversation.

Whether it works

Since March, more people arrive at their first class having already been told what to expect from it, and the number of first-timers who booked something wildly unsuitable has gone to roughly zero. What I notice most is a change in the phone calls: people now ring to confirm rather than to ask. It said Foundations on Tuesday — is that right? Yes. It is right.

I would rather have built this than almost anything else we have spent money on. It cost nothing but arguing.