Back in May 2023, I worked on an app concept for a client who was in the ideation phase of their product. I helped them realise their ideas by providing feedback and designing the UI for their app, as well as doing some brand work to help them get investment.

We kicked off with a discussion about what their product is, what problems they are solving, and who their users are to get an idea of the problem space. I asked questions around the nature of their business, their target demographic, what brands they draw inspiration from, and so on.

I also had a read through their investor decks, which I redesigned as part of the project, to understand the market and how they were going about their pitch. This was helpful to understand at this stage as their immediate goal was to get funding, so I had to focus my design efforts around that.

I started by putting a brand pack together to base the app design on. Logo design and branding isn’t something I usually do, however, seeing as the client had no professional design work done, I offered to put something together to help them get investment.

I chose a handful of colours, with orange as the primary colour as it has connotations of speed and activity. I then chose a bold typeface that went with the elite sport theme, and with tabular numbers as this was going to be used for displaying statistics:

As for the logo, we went through a few different iterations after presenting different concepts to the client and applying feedback:

We decided on an icon and text logo. The icon used negative spaces from letters used in the word ‘Kaizen’. A combination of sharp and rounded corners was used to provide contrast, giving both a sense of eliteness and swiftness/speed:

The font chosen stays consistent to the style guide, using strong, bold letters to establish strength and stability. I created two versions: a full logo, and an icon-only version to be used as the app icon and in social media profiles. I also provided guidance around the icon’s usage and spacing:

For the app, we started by putting together a list of requirements. The user needs were defined by the client, who had vast experience in the field. Each screen went through numerous feedback rounds to ensure the client was happy with the design and the UI style.

For the signup journey, we followed the usual patterns. The only distinction was a step for linking sports wearables, which was required for data collection. For this, we saw that we needed integrations with the wearable accounts, so we prompted the user to log in to connect their data and grant permissions:

As for displaying data, we had numerous brainstorming sessions where we thought about what kind of data we would get, how we could display it in a way that was most useful for the user, and how we could create personalised goals around them - this was the core of the product. We also saw an opportunity for implementing AI to trigger personalised recommendations based on the data:

To tackle the user problems around motivation, I suggested introducing gamification features - we introduced a challenges tab, where coaches would create challenges for the team and individuals to get them to focus on specific areas. My idea was to then reward users with Kaizen Points (KPs) on completion, which would accumulate into levels to be displayed on the user’s profile page:

Again, thinking about the user demographic, this made sense seeing as users would recognise the experience system often used in video games, which are popular amongst the younger age range.

There was also a big focus on the social aspect of the app, where the client wanted to create a sense of community. I took this idea and designed a feed, where users could react and comment on photos and player statistics to transform improvements in statistics into social rewards:

Thinking again about the user problems of motivation, I also suggested we use encouraging messaging every so often to keep them engaged by highlighting the improvements they have made, and how close they are to achieving their goals:

We also thought about how we would drive users into the app to check their statistics, and what the call to actions would be through notifications and widgets:

In conclusion, this was a very fun project to work on. I worked a lot of my data design skills, and got to be involved working in a team to brainstorm ideas focused around user problems.