Cubii

Cubii made fitness accessible, we made their fitness app accessible

Blending wellness into users’ everyday lives & making it accessible to all ages, physical abilities & lifestyles.

Cubii App profile and activity statistics

Type

Mobile, Tablet,Apple Watch

Segment

Consumer (B2C)

Business

Startup

Industry

Health & Fitness

Geography

Chicago, USA

Year

Since 2015

Brief

Being the Design and Tech Partner to Cubii

Cubii is the world's first smart under-the-desk elliptical trainer, enabling workouts while sitting. We partnered with this ‘stay fit while you sit’ focused start-up, and have been their digital tech partners ever since. Our aim - to keep the app constantly at par with their evolving vision and justifying their state of the art fitness equipment. We are responsible for ensuring a smooth user experience and functionality of their fitness tracker app, following the best practices in UX Design, Backend, iOS, Android and QA Testing.

“Most development firms are very good at building what the client tells them to; very few go beyond the specified scope to offer recommendations that address potential pitfalls in security, quality control and scalability.”
Ryota SekineCOO, Cubii
Cubii UI Design details for table
Challenge

To assist the most convenient fitness tracking

Auditing the present UX for major pitfalls
Continuous iterations by looping in the users
Managing BLE Connection across OEM devices & Android versions
Making a fun and intuitive animation that tunes with live work-out
Leveraging machine learning for predictions
“When we designed this app in the early days, the target audience was not clear and we used to design based on assumptions. After a few months when we learnt the fact that 60+ years is our target audience, we started thinking differently. Every decision since then has been data driven, user tested and heavily tested before implementation.”
Bhakti DudharaDirector of UX Design, Aubergine Solutions

Auditing the present UX for major pitfalls

Auditing the present UX for major pitfalls

  • UX Audit and Usability Heuristic Evaluation
  • Competitive Analysis to gather insights
  • Brainstorming workshops with stakeholders

We swear by conducting unbiased and thorough research & UX audit, in order to ensure the success of digital products. Cubii was no different. An extensive UX Audit of their existing product revealed a huge potential for improvement. A study of backend usage analytics, interviews with customer support team and usability heuristic evaluation revealed insights that would change the game for the app. These insights were then evaluated against those of market competitors to identify meaningful opportunities. A little delve into the UX audit report with Cubii stakeholders, sort of lit up our path ahead.

Cubii Heuristic evaluation report

Continuous iterations by looping in the users

Continuous iterations by looping in the users

  • User interviews & usability testing to derive insights
  • Prioritising features to appeal to broad audience range
  • Iterating according to audience demographics

Your answers lie in the questions of your users. In case of Cubii, we dealt with audiences falling under varied age-groups, health conditions and life-styles. Also, the fitness app development included a lot of functions like signing up, on-boarding, connecting to the device through Bluetooth, setting goals, participating in a race……the list can go on. Permuting and combining all these functionalities with a broad audience range, while still maintaining an endearing ease was challenging. We iterated and simplified the workflows, keeping it to a bare minimum while still retaining intuitiveness.

John Oliver

John Oliver

I wish to stay active as most of my day is a desk job. I would love to track my progress and be engaged in a group with my colleagues to stay motivated.

Liza Cooper

Liza Cooper

My doctor recommended me to use Cubii while I work from my desk job. I am very active in the community, have made new friends and do share my progress often.

John Oliver

John Oliver

I wish to stay active as most of my day is a desk job. I would love to track my progress and be engaged in a group with my colleagues to stay motivated.

Liza Cooper

Liza Cooper

My doctor recommended me to use Cubii while I work from my desk job. I am very active in the community, have made new friends and do share my progress often.

Impact
“This app is beautiful, informative and easy to use. “
“This app is beautiful, informative and easy to use. “

Managing BLE Connection across OEM devices & Android versions

Managing BLE Connection across OEM devices & Android versions

  • Seamless experience for BLE connection
  • Execution across different OEM devices
  • Smooth operations across Android OS versions

The fitness tracking application connects to Cubii’s fitness equipment, using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Service of the Mobile device. Implementation of different BLE by different OEMs in the Android Ecosystem was the biggest challenge. For a particular range of Android OS versions, Location and GPS permissions are mandatory for scanning the Bluetooth enabled devices. OS is primarily responsible for handling some callbacks when the application is in background mode. This makes it difficult to visually show some states when the application comes to the foreground. Different OEMs have different reconnection logic and different sleep/kill logic for the BLE background services, so to make it work across, was a good engineering and testing challenge.

Cubii BLE connection across devices

Making a fun and intuitive animation that tunes with live work-out

Making a fun and intuitive animation that tunes with live work-out

  • Intuitive animation, depicting live work-out
  • Tackled staggered experience on low-device RAM

We created an animation of a cyclist that cycles for every pedal completed on the BLE hardware. We successfully managed multiple states of the animation. For example, a low pace cycling state for when the user is cycling slowly, or that of the cyclist standing at one place for when the user is not cycling. We chose animations that are based on lightweight JSON files rendered using lottie animation plugin to ensure a smooth experience, even on low-end user devices that have low RAM.

Cubii live work-out animation
“We realized how we need to focus on architectural and monitoring solutions while the user base was quickly growing. We started optimizing some previously implemented solutions and undertaking Risk Analysis of the overall application.”
Naitik ShahTech Lead, Aubergine Solutions

Leveraging machine learning for predictions

Leveraging machine learning for predictions

  • Deep Learning algorithms
  • Strategic incentives to revive dormant users

For our data prediction model, we experimented with various ML algorithms and decided in favor of Deep learning (DNN) to be the best fit for Cubii’s requirements. We analyzed past-workout data to identify users that had stopped using the device. Accordingly, we crafted incentives, specifically targeting this set of dormant users to increase the app usage rate.

Cubii Communitii mock-up
Cubii Communitii mock-up

Building a community for like-minded people

The portability of Cubii makes it so versatile that it could be used in office, rehab centers, clubs and homes. This gives an opportunity for like-minded people to create a community within the world of Cubii to motivate each other to achieve more every day!

Cubii Share stories mock-up

Sharing moments as Stories of achievement

The community of Cubii users can share content across multiple parameters like workouts completed, badges earned, progress made for a given day or week or a simple photo of them working out using the device.

Cubii challenge completed mock-up
Cubii Daily goals achievement mock-up

Achieving goals that accomplish a journey

When the community curates content for everyone, it feels more like a game and in no time you achieve more than you imagines. The little milestones combine to form a wall of achievements resulting into badges that users can proudly showcase in their profiles.

Cubii Live class for training

Training under experts in order to achieve results

A lot can be achieved if training is done under an expert’s guidance. The studio experience is catered to multiple interest levels, focus areas, strength levels and more. These live sessions empower the users to achieve more using their device.

Cubii Watch mock-up

Stay on track, on the go!

The tracking doesn’t stop even if your phone is not around you. Just keep pedaling and tracking will be taken care of by technology.

Our recent work

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