Our work
Speedo
- Product design & build
The Challenge
Design the first watch app to launch on Samsung watches aimed at swimmers
Samsung were impressed with Speedo’s best-in-class swimming platform, Speedo On. They were looking to launch their first water resistant watches and a partnership with Speedo was formed to develop a Speedo On watch application. Mediablaze was asked to lead the project.
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UX Design
A different kind of user journey
We were lucky enough to be sent some of the world's first versions of the Samsung watches pre-launch. The first thing we did was to research how the watch itself worked. How did you navigate? What was natural to the Tizen OS that the watch ran on?
The two target devices were the Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro and the Samsung Gear Sport. The only difference being some connectivity capabilities and the Gear Sport being a round device.
We used Figma to manage the entire UX design process. Getting user feedback early on was key. From initial pencil drawn clickable prototypes to higher and higher fidelity UI screens. Because the device itself was minimal, we got creative replacing some of the actions. For example, there is a hardware button on the right hand side of the device itself so we used the browser's back button to imitate this feature.
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UI Design
Small screen design
The display specification of the Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro is 216x432 at a resolution of 144dpi. This meant that the screen itself measures just 1.5" diagonally. The considerations for the UI in this product design and build regarding type sizes, button sizing and any graphics needed to be carefully considered.
We used the Tizen OS guidelines to ensure that icons and text were legible and used native styles for buttons, this ensured that for users of the device, the navigation felt intuitive.
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Engineering
Sophisticated algorithms
Mediablaze collaborated with with the Cambridge Design Partnership who developed algorithms that translated data from the accelerometer and gyroscope in the ergonomic wrist-worn device into measurements of lap count, lap time, stroke type and stroke count.
"One of the key challenges was understanding which stroke was being used as we had to classify the data taking into account wide variations in swim technique. Lap counting was also complex as we were simply using measurements of hand movements – yet needed to differentiate between normal swimming and the movements during a turn.”
Roberto Basile
Software engineer
Cambridge Design Partnership
Customer-Centric Technologies
Creating a native watch app that runs on the Tizen operating system and integrates with Android smartphones presented it's own unique set of challenges. Here's just some of the tech involved:
AWS
Laravel
Figma
Tizen
C++
"Mediablaze have been everything I could have asked for from a digital agency. Expert, responsive and ultimately we're very happy with the final product."
Claire Clough
Head of Digital Experience
Pentland Brands
