When it came time to redesign our mobile app from the ground up, integrating it into our athlete management system RepOne Coach, one concept persistently guided us: if you train one athlete, and that athlete happens to be yourself, you're still a trainer. You set goals, make decisions on long term and short term training plans, and make adjustments when variables change. We find this behavior to be essentially ubiquitous in conversations we have with our customers. Why is it, we thought, that training apps treated you either like the athlete, or like the coach? It's a false dichotomy that becomes clear as day the first time you use the RepOne Athlete app.
With that guiding principle, we set off on a two plus year journey to design an incredibly ambitious piece of software. We're currently in the alpha phase, and are extending invites to customers soon for beta testing, and we anticipate a launch this side of 2024. To give you an idea of why this project has been so intensive, I'll describe the leading contributors of complexity.
It's a training app
We learned early on that a lot of our customers were using the current RepOne Personal app not just to track their velocity data, but to log the rest of their untracked training as well. The behavior isn't difficult to decode, why use multiple apps if you can just use one? The problem is RepOne Personal was initially designed as a data collection app, where you could log sets that included velocity metrics, or you could log untracked sets if you forgot your Tether that day. RepOne Athlete needed to improve on that by natively supporting all types of exercise tracking like a typical training app.
It's RepOne Connected future-proof
Not only did it have to function like a normal training app, but it also needed to be flexible enough to work with any possible future RepOne Connected equipment. That's a tall order. We had to design an interface that could be compatible with smart equipment that hadn't been made yet. After a truly bewildering number of iterations, our incredibly talented Head of Design Logan came up with a tab system that's both highly functional and a pleasure to use. This system is working flawlessly with the new RepOne Connected Kratos Flywheel, as well as our own RepOne Tether.
It's smart AF
We learned a simple truth from our experience in Velocity Based Training: data that isn't actionable can be worse than no data at all. That's why all of the data coming off of RepOne Connected equipment needed to power live-guidance, if users choose to do so. To support this, our tab system was modified to a tab-and-card system that's truly novel. It can make sense of any data coming in, keep the correct things in focus, all without getting in the way. This wasn't just a UI/UX challenge, the code to enable all of these interactions was incredibly tedious and full of edge-cases. Luckily our CTO John can tackle 'incredibly tedious' in his sleep.
The powerful tab-and-card system is capable of more than just logic-based guidance. RepOne Athlete was built for a future when the rush of increasingly intelligent AI systems is capable of generating truly useful instruction.
While we wrap up development of RepOne Athlete, our recently re-engineered RepOne Personal app works fantastically well as a data-collection, analysis, and training log app. We love using it with the newly-smart Kratos Flywheel, and are looking forward to getting the new app in the hands of both flywheel and VBT customers as soon as possible.