High Performance
Rocketing to prominence, The High Performance Podcast has garnered a thriving community of listeners, eager to apply the podcast’s lessons to their daily lives. Creating an accompanying mobile app demanded giving visual form to a brand that had primarily existed in the auditory realm.
Rocketing to prominence, The High Performance Podcast has garnered a thriving community of listeners, eager to apply the podcast’s lessons to their daily lives. Creating an accompanying mobile app demanded giving visual form to a brand that had primarily existed in the auditory realm.
tl;dr
tl;dr
tl;dr
who?
A community of people seeking to perform at their peak
The High Performance Podcast hit the airwaves in 2020 as a means to explore the success of high achievers from various industries. The recipe was simple—hosts Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes interview high-performing guests and distill their conversations into life lessons for listeners to apply in their daily practice. The podcast was an immediate success and over the following years amassed a devoted following, eager for more connection with the community, and more content from their favourite conversations.
The High Performance Podcast hit the airwaves in 2020 as a means to explore the success of high achievers from various industries. The recipe was simple—hosts Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes interview high-performing guests and distill their conversations into life lessons for listeners to apply in their daily practice. The podcast was an immediate success and over the following years amassed a devoted following, eager for more connection with the community, and more content from their favourite conversations.
why?
Inspire evolution, facilitate connection and foster resilience
Constrained by the boundaries of their distribution channels, the High Performance team pursued multiple avenues to connect with their audience, gradually publishing a series of books, organising live events and coaching sessions, and producing members-only bonus content served via email and social platforms. But the audience’s appetite for deeper connection was insatiable, and the vast archive of high-quality recordings continued to grow. The idea for a custom mobile app emerged, and the team reached out to me to help make it a reality.
Constrained by the boundaries of their distribution channels, the High Performance team pursued multiple avenues to connect with their audience, gradually publishing a series of books, organising live events and coaching sessions, and producing members-only bonus content served via email and social platforms. But the audience’s appetite for deeper connection was insatiable, and the vast archive of high-quality recordings continued to grow. The idea for a custom mobile app emerged, and the team reached out to me to help make it a reality.
how?
Define High Performance in form and feeling
Despite having amassed a rich library of audio and video recordings, and having curated hundreds of ‘golden nugget’ soundbites of various lengths, the team had only ever loosely defined their visual guidelines. As we collaborated on defining the content structure for the app, I set about collecting feedback, preparing wireframes and crafting prototypes. Alongside a tiny team of diligent practitioners, we produced a beta version of the app within six months, releasing to a limited audience and capturing meaningful feedback as we refined and expanded the feature set.
Despite having amassed a rich library of audio and video recordings, and having curated hundreds of ‘golden nugget’ soundbites of various lengths, the team had only ever loosely defined their visual guidelines. As we collaborated on defining the content structure for the app, I set about collecting feedback, preparing wireframes and crafting prototypes. Alongside a tiny team of diligent practitioners, we produced a beta version of the app within six months, releasing to a limited audience and capturing meaningful feedback as we refined and expanded the feature set.
Establishing the core
As High Performance expanded its offerings over the years, various agencies were employed to create collateral, each bringing a distinct flavour to the visual style. When determining how to present the app experience, I began by tracing the roots and analysing the evolution of patterns, distilling core traits of upward progression, typographic expression and a combination of sharp and soft angles.
As High Performance expanded its offerings over the years, various agencies were employed to create collateral, each bringing a distinct flavour to the visual style. When determining how to present the app experience, I began by tracing the roots and analysing the evolution of patterns, distilling core traits of upward progression, typographic expression and a combination of sharp and soft angles.
A logo was already in broad circulation, and abandoning it altogether was not a desirable approach. The original iteration of the logo was in uppercase, with an upwards-pointing letter ‘A‘ as the signature glyph. But a subsequent switch to lowercase resulted in the custom letter ‘a’ feeling forced and out of place.
I modified the glyph to closer resemble a letter ‘o’ and shifted its position to the middle of the wordmark. With some thoughtful typographic adjustments to optimise the logo for small sizes, I found ways to build on the brand foundations while refining and enhancing the logo’s readability and recognisability.
The community engages the most with High Performance video content, so motion plays a key role in bringing the brand to life and setting the tone for digital applications. Pulsing upwards and brimming with energy, the custom glyph sits comfortably in the core of the wordmark, or shines in isolation as an app icon.
A logo was already in broad circulation, and abandoning it altogether was not a desirable approach. The original iteration of the logo was in uppercase, with an upwards-pointing letter ‘A‘ as the signature glyph. But a subsequent switch to lowercase resulted in the custom letter ‘a’ feeling forced and out of place.
I modified the glyph to closer resemble a letter ‘o’ and shifted its position to the middle of the wordmark. With some thoughtful typographic adjustments to optimise the logo for small sizes, I found ways to build on the brand foundations while refining and enhancing the logo’s readability and recognisability.
The community engages the most with High Performance video content, so motion plays a key role in bringing the brand to life and setting the tone for digital applications. Pulsing upwards and brimming with energy, the custom glyph sits comfortably in the core of the wordmark, or shines in isolation as an app icon.
Enriching the experience
Through synthesising the knowledge we had gathered, and aligning on the essential functionality needed to enable our goals, we scoped a minimum viable product and a plan to make it happen. We chose to build in Flutter, thereby enabling cross-platform deployment. I studied the capabilities and rapidly established a design system, harnessing the technology’s best practice guidelines for token conventions and interaction frameworks.
Because the app content was primarily audiovisual media, we chose to pursue a rich, immersive interface, with dark and muted backgrounds enabling vibrant media to shine. Content was already being tagged and grouped within one of six categories, so with these as a foundation for user discovery, I created icons and defined tonal palettes for use in motion graphics and contextual UI elements.
The signature moment
Knowing that our community were most interested in continuous self-improvement, and the content that resonated most was often single quotes or phrases, we created a feature called ‘Daily Boost’, which packages a short, curated snippet from a previous episode with an inspiring question and related content. So many thought-provoking conversations over the years contained gems of insight and inspiration, each surfacing individual perspectives on high performance from experts in their fields.
Users can schedule Boost notifications to suit their routine, and we encourage them to incorporate the habit by maintaining a watch streak. Following each clip, the episode from which the content was selected is surfaced alongside a guest bio and links to related episodes. These mechanisms simultaneously foster engagement, and serve to demonstrate the breadth of guests and content in the High Performance archive, facilitating users on their journey to uncover inspiration.
Enabling exploration
Hundreds of episodes had been produced, categorised and tagged over the years, each of which contained unique perspectives and insights from sports stars, leaders, experts, entertainers and more high-performing guests. But there was no way for users to find content beyond scrolling through the episode feed of their podcast app.
Simply exposing the wide range of topics and encouraging users to search for guests and topics provided a launchpad for people to find relevant content. Within search results, users can filter by topic, duration and media type. This straightforward approach to enabling exploration remains widely used by users and has supported the reactivation of less-recently published episodes.
Hundreds of episodes had been produced, categorised and tagged over the years, each of which contained unique perspectives and insights from sports stars, leaders, experts, entertainers and more high-performing guests. But there was no way for users to find content beyond scrolling through the episode feed of their podcast app.
Simply exposing the wide range of topics and encouraging users to search for guests and topics provided a launchpad for people to find relevant content. Within search results, users can filter by topic, duration and media type. This straightforward approach to enabling exploration remains widely used by users and has supported the reactivation of less-recently published episodes.
Powering packaging
There were abundant opportunities in curating packages of content, so they could be easily browsed, searched, saved and modified. With this in mind, we built functionality for ‘Collections’, which enabled us to group episodes of any kind so they could be shared and saved. Surfaced on the homepage, relevant episode pages and in search results, users can easily build their own library of High Performance content.
We created ‘Bands’ as a way to house collections and provide further means to group related content. With these introductions to our publishing tools, fresh opportunities to connect people with content were unlocked, sparking new ideas and setting a strong foundation on which to build engagement.
There were abundant opportunities in curating packages of content, so they could be easily browsed, searched, saved and modified. With this in mind, we built functionality for ‘Collections’, which enabled us to group episodes of any kind so they could be shared and saved. Surfaced on the homepage, relevant episode pages and in search results, users can easily build their own library of High Performance content.
We created ‘Bands’ as a way to house collections and provide further means to group related content. With these introductions to our publishing tools, fresh opportunities to connect people with content were unlocked, sparking new ideas and setting a strong foundation on which to build engagement.
Spotlight on guests
Many celebrity guests had shared their perspectives in conversation with Jake and Damian over the years, as the podcast had become a valuable tool to connect with fans and promote work on a wider scale. Guest photos were added to audio-only episodes, while video content was embellished with subtle animations, presenting celebrities and their message front and centre in search results and episode pages.
With the key components of our design system and brand guidelines in place, the app was fully rolled out in November 2023, almost one year since the casual conversation which led to its creation. Strong collaboration with a tiny crew of experienced professionals enabled us to operate at rocket pace and deliver a rich, cross-platform mobile product from scratch in only a few months. This was an invigorating side project which allowed me to flex all of my creative muscles and contribute to a community centred on self-improvement and positivity, for which I am extremely grateful.