Forging the Future of Connected Fitness with TRAKK 

Embracing the fitness journey alongside Pulse, we accelerated the evolution of their TRAKK app by tackling key UX and performance challenges, propelling them towards a seamless experience filled with innovative features. 

77%

increase in active users

41%

increase in app installs

1

week to introduce a SCRUM mentality

Meet the Product Team at Pulse Fitness

The Pulse product team are passionate about delivering user experiences that customers love. 

Back in 2019, the company had embarked on a massive expansion into the connected fitness market to complement their high-end equipment, creating a native app to help gym-goers log their workout progress, develop custom workout plans and hit their fitness targets. 

To achieve their corporate objectives (revenue growth and market expansion), the product team needed to move quicker than ever before and deliver customer experiences consistent with their market leading equipment. 

Our Role 

Working alongside the product team, we introduced Scrum and collaboratively mapped out user journeys to bridge the expectation gap between their hardware and their software, while building a solid foundation to innovate from thereon. 

The Challenge 

  • To deliver excellent customer experiences that encourage repeated use.
  • To rapidly meet growing customer expectations in TRAKK.
  • To pay down the technical debt accrued in the past.

With their equipment in over 30,000 leisure facilities spanning 31 countries, Pulse Fitness has been helping gym goers hit their personal best for decades.  

Having become a household name for their high-quality hardware from treadmills to weight machines, Pulse Fitness saw an opportunity to deliver more value to fitness fanatics and gym owners by expanding into the connected fitness space, linking their world-renowned hardware to a digital companion app. 

The product team are responsible for the React app, ‘TRAKK’, which made great early progress, but their long-standing design and development processes had begun presenting issues: 

  • Bugs, slow loading times and difficulties producing fixes meant that the in-app experience fell below expectations and was harming their brand reputation. 
  • The adhoc development process meant that actioning changes or innovation took significant time, slowing down progress and costing them their competitive edge. 
  • Historic tech stack choices and dictated design had racked up technical debt and created an app that was bloated, making it harder to steer the app in the exciting directions they wanted to go in.  

The Problem Statement 

Working with the Pulse Fitness product team, the big question was: 

“How might we improve the TRAKK app in a way that delivers high quality features and UX improvements, faster?” 

We heard this problem loud and clear, and this is how we cracked it together… 

The Solution 

1. Design 

To get the best out of our partnership and create a shared understanding of the app’s functionality, userbase and ambitions, we joined Pulse’s team for a User Journey and Alignment Workshop where we: 

  • Defined the app’s user personas (e.g. gym owners, gym members, staff etc.) 
  • Mapped out the most common flows for users of TRAKK and how they interact with the gym equipment, the app and other people. 
  • Figured out how in-app processes like onboarding and accessing workout plans could be made more user friendly.  

2. Engineering 

With a shared design mentality and alignment on our goals, we then agreed to address the priorities as quickly as possible to increase usage immediately, opting to use Tailwind to rapidly deploy CSS without sacrificing quality and adopting a Scrum mentality to agile product development. 

It was a no-brainer; weekly sprints that packed in analysis, development, testing and deployment (where necessary) were the best way of focusing on issues that were causing users to leave the app and turnaround new features faster than ever before.  

Not only that, but it gave structure to Pulse’s roadmap and created greater transparency for stakeholders (marketing, sales, etc.) over what engineering was taking place when.  

The impact was felt immediately. In our first few months alone, we: 

  • Resolved the most pressing bugs, improving customer experience immediately. 
  • Introduced self-registration in-app, taking pressure off the gyms to register members individually first. 
  • Integrated their ‘Class Booking’ software to enable gym-goers to view and book onto classes relevant to their gym. 
  • Developed an area to present preset workout plans produced by Pulse Fitness.  
  • Deployed a new feature to display how busy a given gym was. 

3. Simplified Communication 

A sprint format meant that engineering and decisions were going to happen a lot faster. As a result, we knew that communication was going to be critical to help the Pulse team make the most informed decisions and stay agile.  

To best support the Pulse UX and product teams, we: 

  • Introduced weekly calls to work with stakeholders directly. 
  • Introduced Jira to collaboratively manage issues and roadmap items. 
  • Provided regular updates on the status of different work. 

Results 

77%

increase in active users

41%

increase in app installs

1

week to introduce a SCRUM mentality

6

weeks to design and deploy solutions for legacy issues

Our partnership with Pixeltree has evolved splendidly beyond the initial transition, establishing a deeper collaboration in the development of our web app alongside our design team. This synergy has significantly amplified our product ecosystem, pushing the boundaries of innovation and efficiency.
Dave Johnson - Product Director Pulse Fitness

Solving Big Digital Problems. Together. 

Meet the collaborators! Working alongside the Pulse product team were these friendly faces.

From weekly catchups on sprint progress and evaluating the backlog to celebrating the launch of fresh functionality, we were never more than a call away.  

How we overlapped with the team at Pulse Fitness

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