Challenge

6 Hours to create a competitive digital product

i participated in a public hackathon. We formed our own teams and had 6 hours to create a new product before we pitched it to a panel of judges.

Solution

SwimFitt: workout tracking app that inspires healthy living

The team created SwimFitt, a mobile app that inspires healthy living by helping people track their swim workouts. By giving swimmers guided workouts, insights to calories burned, progress metrics, and the ability to share that progress with others, SwimFitt can motivate swimmers to swim more, stay fit, and live altogether happier lives.

The Process: Research and Strategy

common goal to work towards to stay on track

As our ideas started flowing, we quickly set out to define our product goals, mission, and scope so we knew what we were working on and towards. We wrote down the tasks for the day and what we needed to accomplish in 6 hours.

defining users and benefits for the necessary features

For consumers, they get an app that helps them live a healthier life.

• Recreational swimmers can get suggested workouts.
• People swimming for fitness can get calorie burn insights.
• People training for events can set goals and track progress.

For the businesses, they will make money by providing health-related product offers.

• Once people have reached their goals on the app, they will get coupons for health products.

other apps exist but none does everything SwimFitt does

We conducted competitive and comparative analysis. The SwimPro app allows one to preselect workouts, but one cannot create their own goals.  Also, the app doesn’t allow visibility into how many calories are burned until the workout is logged. For the Deck Pass app, one can just set goals and share information with people but it requires the person to belong to a swim team and login as a member of a team.

All heads are better than one

As the ideas flowed out, we fleshed them out with sketches on the table we were working on, our sketchbooks, and the whiteboard. Once we crowded around the whiteboard, we continue throwing out more ideas and built on each other’s ideas for a stronger solution.

Branding & marketing to sell our idea

Since we were going to pitch our idea to a panel of judges, we knew we needed to brand the mobile app so it had an identify and we needed to market the product in an appealing way so the judges would be convinced of our great idea.

We decided to brand SwimFitt with the slogan “Fitness for your life”. Our introducing selling pitch was “Both aerobic and anaerobic, and less injury prone than other sports, swimming is one of the best workouts anyone can do for themselves...”

Results and Reflection

collaboration for 1st place

Our team won 1st place for our carefully thought out process and development of our product. What helped us succeed was that we leveraged all our strengths and our different ideas to create a solution that was stronger than just anyone’s individual idea.

Next Steps:

Our next steps include building out the UI and development of the product, integration with wearables, and more research and testing.