Sloper

Sloper was birthed from a conversation at my local climbing gym. A friend of mine came up with some ideas to create a climbing app and I offered to build out the UI for him—the humble beginnings of a much larger product design undertaking. My initial design focused on displaying climbing totals and an accompanying logbook of the climbs. I wanted bold visuals and playful colors to mimic the fun and exciting atmosphere of climbing gyms.

Sloper is a simple, yet powerful app that allows you to keep track of different types of climbs, both indoor and outdoor, as well as provide training programs to each unique climbing category.

Unlike other sports, participants rarely have their phones on them while partaking in the activity. In fact, climbing with anything in your pockets is prohibited in most climbing facilities. To record climbs an individual would have to manually input their workouts vs a running app where the GPS tracks the activity and the user simply hits a save button to record the event. In order to provide the easiest entry possible, I focused on designing comfortably sized buttons that categorize the essential information of each climb in five presses or less.

The workout assistant is especially helpful with regard to hangboard sessions. There is a staggering variety of hangboards available on the market, and some boards provide more specialized workouts than others. In Sloper, you can choose which hangboard you’re using and record specific workouts down to each finger you want to train. The timer can be programmed to signal rests and reps during a workout so that the climber doesn’t have to enter any additional information or touch the phone with chalky fingers during their workout.