JRNY Strength with Motion Tracking
JRNY is a digital fitness platform that offers personalized cardio, strength, and whole-body workouts that evolve as you do. My team and I helped Bowflex design and bring to market a new and improved strength-centric workout experience within the JRNY app that leverages motion tracking, form coaching, and voice commands.
CLIENT
Bowflex
COMPANY
Supply
ROLE
Creative Director, Product Planner, Design Strategist
JRNY’s core value is its ability to provide adaptive workouts that evolve with the fitness journey of its users. Do do this it needs to be able to measure the user’s performance. For cardio workouts, this can be done directly by measuring user interactions via the hardware (bikes, ellipticals, treadmills, etc.). Weights and bodyweight don’t have this direct connection, which left Bowflex — a company known for their strength equipment — with a fitness platform that was very cardio-centric and left an important part of their audience underserved.
Democratizing access to fitness coaching.
In late 2021 Bowflex approached Supply and asked us to help them create a new JRNY experience that would make fitness coaching more accessible to people doing strength workouts at home with free weights. They wanted to help people improve their form and track their reps, all while using the phone or tablet they already owned.
In addition to running Supply’s design team, this project presented me with three distinct challenges:
01
Leading product planning efforts to enable product stakeholders to get aligned and set priorities.
02
Leading UX design for a type of workout experience that was unique to the JRNY platform.
03
Piloting a more collaborative design and development process with the Bowflex team to keep everyone in sync and leverage our shared expertise.
01
Product Planning
With a project team spanning UX design, voice UX (VUX), development, vision tracking, exercise science, and media production, getting all of us aligned on what we were building was crucial.
To support this, my team and I transformed our client’s existing knowledge and research findings into an extensive UX and VUX backlog, capturing user stories, design/dev sizing estimates, and notes on constraints or unresolved technical questions. All of these (200+ line items) were then organized into a streamlined format for easy review with stakeholders. As spreadsheets go it was a thing of beauty, and proved highly effective in aligning the team on features and priorities.
Our client stakeholders seemed to agree and asked me to share our process with their team so they could learn how to replicate it for other projects. Here are a few of the recommendations I shared:
Supply’s work exceeded our expectations. We even called on them to help us coach and build our internal teams’ practices and processes. We became a more effective team as a result of operating more like Supply.
— Steve Rodden, Senior Director of User Experience at Bowflex
02
UX Design
My team and I prototyped and designed a product experience that uses real-time motion tracking and voice-assisted feedback to help people correct their form and make accurate adjustments as they work out. Additionally, the app counted reps, recorded the actual weight being used, and factored all this information into more informed workout recommendations.
UI at a Distance
The integration of motion tracking introduced some unique challenges, as it required users to position their phone or tablet 8-10 feet away during workouts. This meant any new screen designs needed to meet a high bar for legibility at a distance, without losing their connection to JRNY's existing design system that had been designed to be viewed no further than an arm's-length away.
Big, Clean, and Colorful
To solve for this, we extended the JRNY design system to optimize existing workout elements for room-scale visibility. The redesigned strength workout screens featured a simplified layout, larger visuals, and a color-coded set of workout metrics to help users easily track their workout from a distance.
Communicating Form
An on-screen representation of the user’s form was crucial for coaching and demonstrating accurate tracking to the user. After iterating on several skeleton designs and testing their visibility within the workout flow, we chose the “open dot + radius” approach for its clean yet scientific look. The skeleton was overlaid skeleton on the user’s camera view for position calibration and when voice form corrections needed reinforcing.
A Visual Representation of Voice
To minimize the need for users to physically interact with the screen during workouts, we added voice commands for specifying weights and correcting rep counts if the vision system miscounted. Collaborating with the voice UX team, we created a visual avatar to indicate when JRNY, our voice assistant, was speaking, listening, or processing user commands, using visual metaphors to communicate each state.
03
Collaborative Design + Development
At the start of this engagement I was asked to help the product design and development team operate more effectively together. The solution to this (in my mind) was simple — design and development needed to work as two equal parts of a single team. I immediately reached out to their technical project manager to figure out how to snap our two teams together.
Since development had a more rigorous approach to sprint cadence and rituals, I aligned the design team with their process, adopting a traditional agile model with 2-week sprints. This setup provided regular opportunities for each team to check-in and leverage the other’s expertise. In addition to enabling some really great conversations, this ensured we were designing an experience that solved for our technical reality.
By treating design and development as equal partners we gained the benefit of technical brainstorming and sign-off on concepts before they were locked. This enabled more informed discussions with our stakeholders, and stronger, more implementable solutions.
Outcome
Bowflex successfully launched JRNY Strength with Motion Tracking in January 2023 as part of its JRNY Fitness app on Android and iOS.