Empowering Athletes to Stay Hydrated

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.