Overview

Growth exposed the cracks.

Between 2020 and 2023, iFIT's user base grew at a pace the platform wasn't fully built to sustain. Pandemic tailwinds pushed us past a million paid subscribers — many of them first-time fitness adopters — and the numbers looked extraordinary on paper. But underneath the growth, retention was eroding.

New users started strong and dropped off fast. The hardware was selling. The habits weren't forming. At the same time, competition was accelerating — better-funded rivals were closing the gap on both content quality and hardware capability. Winning on content alone was becoming an arms race we couldn't afford to run indefinitely.

The problem wasn't what we were making. It was that we were asking a new behavior to compete with every other demand on a person's day — and we weren't winning that fight often enough.

The opportunity

We stopped competing on content alone. We built a platform.

The honest strategic question wasn't how to make better workouts. It was whether we were leaving value on the table by only offering our own.

iFIT had built some of the most ambitious fitness content in the world — trainers summiting Everest, rowing on the Kafue River, or traversing the Pyrenees. The content was genuinely exceptional and remained the core of what we offered. But no single content library can be everything to everyone. Gaps existed — gaming, music, entertainment — and competitors weren't filling them either.

The opportunity was to stop pretending those gaps didn't exist and open the platform to apps that could fill them. Ergatta brought gaming. Spotify solved music rights. Others covered categories we had no intention of building ourselves. Just like how Apple's content lives alongside Netflix and HBO, and the device is better for it.

The purchase objection of "what if I don't like the built-in workouts" disappears. Time on device increases. And the moat shifts from content library to platform ownership — a fundamentally harder thing to replicate.

New hardware in Fall 2024 made it technically possible. The only question left was whether we could execute it without breaking the experience we'd spent years building.

The solution

One experience to hold them all.

The purpose wasn't to control the design of the 3rd party apps. Spotify looks like Spotify. Amazon Video looks like Amazon Video. That was never the goal and never the problem to solve.

The problem was everything in between.

II designed the navigation layer, transition system, and entry and exit points for every app integration — the parts of the experience that exist outside any single app but determine whether the whole thing feels considered or cobbled together. Every hardware interaction had to stay consistent. The mental model of where you were and how to get back had to hold regardless of which app you were in.
Fitness is not passive. A clunky transition mid-workout doesn't just frustrate — it breaks the experience and gives someone a reason to stop. I mapped every possible state: launching an app, returning to iFIT mid-session, handling notifications, managing connectivity drops. For each one I asked: does this feel like leaving the product, or moving within it?

The design work was less about what you saw inside each app and everything about what happened around them. I worked directly with engineering partners at each integration to define the technical constraints, then designed within them — and sometimes pushed back on them when the constraint was producing the wrong experience.