How Forrest put a twist on fitness tracking — then did it all over again · Sketch Blog

There are difficult second albums, but when it comes to designing great apps, how do you make your first big iteration a hit? For the two-person team behind Forrest, the path from v1 to v2 was obvious and all a matter of time.
Forrest takes fitness tracking and adds a competitive twist. When you set up your workout, you can choose to race against your own personal bests or previous results, or even a ghost racer with a custom time, distance or pace. During your workout, you can see how you’re comparing to your virtual competitors on the app’s race screen and via audio prompts.
Matt Emmins and Adam Swinden — the duo behind Forrest — wanted to take things a step further with a social element that sees you competing virtually and asynchronously against your friends. Throw in a complete redesign, new iconography and a new freemium pricing model, and the pair had their work cut out. So, how did they do it?
We caught up with designer and co-founder, Matt, to talk through Forrest’s unique take on fitness tracking, how they got to v2 and how Sketch helped along the way.
Forrest was born from a passing comment by Adam’s wife, Kathleen, who mentioned she wanted to know how she was performing on her runs, compared to the last one.
What she described was an experience akin to Mario Kart, when you race on a previously completed track against a “ghost racer” with your best time. Adam realized that this could work with visualizations and a set of audio prompts, and this now forms the bedrock of the Forrest race experience.
The very first thing I designed was the logo. I remember when Adam came to me with the idea, I started scribbling these wild marks on a stack of Post-It Notes with a Sharpie. It started with mixture of lettering and abstract marks based on the name that Adam liked for the app idea, Forrest (as in Forrest Gump).
I remember when Adam came to me with the idea, I started scribbling these wild marks on a stack of Post-It Notes with a Sharpie.
I liked the lettering, but never loved it, but the mark was pretty solid (if I do say so myself). It was an abstracted, mirrored F, a bit like a tree. Where it all fell into place was the forward-projecting arrow. Speed, direction, forward motion. It felt like it was all in there.
The initial designs of the interface were poor, if I’m being honest, but that only led to us iterating quickly and throwing out what didn’t work. Adam has always been a huge advocate for mobile and best-in-class behaviors, so taking his lead on certain mechanics and architectural decisions led us to our first MVP.
The state of activity that someone is in is key to how the interface looks. For example, we designed the racer screen to show that ideal level of detail when we expect someone to be at their peak level of activity. There’s a progress bar along the top, showing the racer’s current position and progress, with little else to clutter the interface.
We use large tap targets for any key controls (pause, audio on/off and screen lock) and swipe gestures to move between the three key race views, each showing distinct data. We make these as large as possible to obtain maximum glanceability. When you pair these with audio prompts that automatically lower your music volume, it’s really powerful.
Deciding on the minimum level of information someone needs to understand what you are showing them, without removing context, is easier said than done. This is one area where I find that our iconography can help. Temperature and weather, for example, provide some context around the conditions to the day, but on the top level race feed it’s supplementary to the race data itself.
Deciding on the minimum level of information someone needs to understand what you are showing them, without removing context, is easier said than done
I’d say that this idea of simplification is one of the improvements of v2, over v1. We’ve always had more data and content heavy screens outside the context of a race, but once you’re in the race, we pare things back quite significantly. It’s only what you need, and nothing more. For most runners, I’d hazard they never look at it, but for riders with a handlebar mount, the head-to-head and stats views become a great HUD.
V2 is what V1 was originally supposed to be. We had always planned to build the mechanisms to race your friends, and the social aspect was mentioned in our very first discussion. It was only after we started work on the first version of the app that we realized we needed to break it down into smaller chunks to get something out.
The original build took about five years because of the arrivals of our two boys (who the app icon characters are named after). After hearing that Adam’s wife was pregnant, the aim was to launch before Theo was born. Then we aimed to launch before my son Isaac was born in June but ended up launching on 18th October 2020. During those five years, we changed things as we tested, used the product ourselves, and identified a whole roadmap of features — some of which are in v2.
Forrest is completely independent, self-funded and 100% owned by ourselves
Forrest is completely independent, self-funded and 100% owned by ourselves. With our growing families, V2 become even more important. We saw a chance to build a legitimate and profitable business for ourselves, affording us more time to spend with our families.
From a design perspective, I saw v2 as an opportunity to simplify as much as possible. V1 wasn’t dense or cluttered but there were some aspects I could have improved, like signposting of final race positions in the feed, and better groupings of content to focus on distances and times.
The ‘create a race’ screen was a focus for us in v2. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to build a race. We made that race builder element a lot more consistent, rather than having three separate controls to change the settings. This seems to be working really well and makes it easier for users to succinctly see what exercise they are a