Under Armour views itself as a fitness forward brand that specializes in serving the needs of the elite athlete. To that point, elite athletes have very little need for an everyday run of the mill fitness tracker. That’s where HTC stepped in. We worked with Under Armour to concept and build a fitness tracking ecosystem that could be built upon and added to based on your level of athleticism. 

The foundation of this ecosystem is Healthbox, a product comprised of three unique pieces of hardware and one piece of powerful software to connect it all.

It took a close collaboration with ID and Engineering to create a device that looked seamless. The screen is placed below a thin film of material which created some challenges for legibility at first. The solution was to design a custom bitmap font and icons with zero anti-alias to counteract the bloom effect.

Another challenge with our design system was finding a way to accommodate a rich feature set within a compact form. Our LCD panel had a whopping 128x16px of workable resolution. We simplified the IA to 2 layers and maximized space by designing custom type and iconography. We further aided way finding through scrolling patterns, a HW “home” button and visual cues. All said we delivered a design a system that supported five unique interactive regions and dozens of features within a very small space.

The Scale was another new design problem for me because we had to create a system that was easy to navigate with the use of your feet. Outside of being a professional ballerina this proved very difficult for most people. Our solution was to simplify the features and add an info loop that would cycle through stats without the need for touch interaction.

An additional challenge was to make a screen with limited budget, readable from 7 ft away, occupying an area of only 100x20mm, still look premium. Do to this we designed a custom dot matrix display made of super bright yet efficient LED lights beneath a single sheet of frosted glass. We also created a custom typeface that would maximize real estate and compliment the industrial design of the product.

Inside Healthbox you’ll find a small lightweight fitness tracker, an ultra accurate heart rate monitor and an intelligent scale that recognizes multiple unique profiles. When combined with software, these systems stay connected and talk to each other wirelessly. They share fitness and sleep data to make helpful recommendations that allow you to reach your goals. Despite the challenges, and with the brilliant efforts of my design team and design partners, we were able to create a connected experience that not only felt premium and looked beautiful, but provided athletes of all levels with meaningful feedback about their health and fitness.