Empowering Athletes to Stay Hydrated

Athletes of all levels know that hydration plays a key role in helping their bodies endure the intensity of training and competition. Too much or too little fluid can lead to improper hydration, which can decrease athletic performance by as much as 10%.

We facilitated our client’s product journey. Together, we discovered that the right solution was building an iOS mobile app that allows athletes to test their own hydration levels.

What We Did

Mobile Development, Collaborative Product Discovery, Visual Design, UX Design, Product Development, User Testing

Tech Stack

iOS, HealthKit, Ruby, Sinatra, Heroku, Postgres

Opportunity

Our client, a leader in health and sports performance, helps athletes build custom hydration plans based on their personal sweat rate, sweat content, and activity. They initially engages us to make the sweat testing process at their facility more efficient. But it soon became clear that we could support their transition to self-service sweat tests by creating an iOS mobile application.

Solution

When we started our engagement, we worked to make performing sweat rate tests faster and more efficient for the sports dietitians. We identified that the manual work involved in the tests was taking away valuable time from dietitians spending with the athletes, which is an important part of their program. Trends in the fitness industry indicate athletes are already using smartphones to track their workouts. This, combined with a greater focus on data and analytics, made building a mobile app a natural next step. We began to automate and improve the process together, leading us to create a self-service product for our client’s athlete patients.

Before we began building the app, we facilitated Discovery sessions to learn key facts about potential users and how they would use the app. We incorporated what we learned into the design of the iOS mobile app.

The app guides athletes through a self-testing process to help them measure their individual sweat rate. By combining the sweat rate with other health data, real-time weather conditions, and sports-specific recommendations from a team of expert dietitians, athletes use the app to build customized hydration plans to meet their needs. It automates a previously time-consuming process for the dietitians, allowing them to focus more time on the athletes instead of on administrative work.

It was important to build as few features as possible to get a useful, working app that would quickly attract early adopters. We were able to get feedback from athletes to ensure we were building the right features for their needs. This feedback also allowed us to validate our theories by testing the app with athletes from a variety of fitness backgrounds. We used their feedback and our observations to make improvements to the app throughout development.

Results

Together, we turned our client’s state-of-the-art sweat testing process into an innovative new product. Our work sets them ahead of competitors in the sweat testing space. It also functions as a way to raise brand awareness and drive athletes to our client’s facility for additional services.

The app makes doing sweat tests and creating hydration plans easy for athletes to do on their own. This type of technology was previously only available to elite athletes, but the mobile app makes this service available to athletes of all levels.

Recent Case Studies

Water App Screenshot

IoT App Development Elevates Smart Home Water Management

We enhanced our client's IoT app suite capabilities, including device connectivity, tracking, and installation.
View Case Study
Replacing an Excel Solution with Custom Software

Replacing an Excel Solution with Custom Software to Wow Clients and Financial Advisors

We helped Valeo replace a time-consuming Excel solution with custom investment reporting software for their advisors.
View Case Study
vet examining small puppy

Implementing Enterprise DevOps Solutions

We helped our client reimagine enterprise DevOps by creating standardized development environments that reduced setup time from 30 days to 30 minutes.
View Case Study

Let’s develop something special.

Reach out today to talk about how we can work together to shake up your industry.