Today they’ve raised over $300M and are a top competitor in the category, but they came to us with little more than a seed round, an early prototype, a name, and a single objective in mind: design a product that’s going to take over the $11B weight-training market. We worked with them while they were still in product development, to develop hardware that would change the game.
Freeform weight lifting and cardio workouts are not the same as hopping on your exercise bike, form is important. Complete a set of slightly-off squats or bicep curls, and you could strain or injure yourself. Fast feedback is key. And you don’t want to frustrate the user.
Then there’s the experience itself — designing a UI that actually gets people excited to workout. Not only fun the first time, but keeps them coming back every day.
Have a solid objective.
A way to see yourself achieving it.
Sure, the dopamine rush of physical activity can carry people through the first few days, but after a few weeks? We’d need a serious draw. So we designed in-app achievements and goals people could hit every few days.Not only did this motivate people to continue their fitness journey, it gave people new workouts and goals to look forward to.
While working out can be a fulfilling solo activity, people keep going when they have a community to cheer them on. So we integrated a social aspect to keep people motivated: leaderboards.Teams, groups, and leaderboards were a way to feel supported and pushed to get to the next level. As people progressed they also unlocked more challenging classes and goals. A way to excite and surprise people and slide them into classes that matched their skill set.
By identifying and supporting Tempo user’s likes, preferences, and motivators, we were able to significantly increase both weekly engagement as well as the number and duration of the workouts. Not just in the short term, but for a long, long time. We made sure people got their favorites to workout alongside as quickly as possible.
It’s one thing to imagine incentives, another to design them. It means regularly creating new features, new challenges, exercises, and seasonal rewards to keep people engaged. We integrated all of this into Tempo’s scalable design system and UI so they could be designed and launched quickly and as needed.This added up to more than 1,200 components — and every single one could be easily edited on the fly by their product team.
Tempo Studio is a fantastic piece of hardware, including weights, accessories, precise sensors and a large display. But even for premium exercise equipment, $2,500 is a big investment.Luckily, Tempo’s Computer Vision System is so sophisticated they were able to almost entirely replicate the experience with a smartphone and a USB-C dock that connects to your TV.
With this new, shrunken down offering, Tempo was able to drop the price of their hardware by 90% — $245 for Tempo Core (and $495 for Tempo Move), all while keeping the same high-end equipment and fantastic user experience. This goes to show — a well-designed user experience can go beyond the hardware, to become a streamlined, scalable product.
Product Lead
Tempo“Aerolab’s expertise in design, across a variety of platforms, helped us quickly launch and iterate Tempo. Their efficient project management kept things running smoothly, which enabled us to accomplish big things in a small amount of time.”
