In 2021, Beachbody went through a huge rebrand.  The company renamed itself BODI, went public, and launched a bike to complete with Peloton.  The bicycle product was facilitated via a merger with a small company called MYX who had released a bike and tablet experience to limited but significant success.  In addition to the existing MYX users, BODI had a secondary brand called Openfit that would also be sold the bike and tablet experience.  

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The problem we were tasked to solve was offering a single bike to three different brands:  existing MYX users, Openfit users, and BODI users.  BODI was by far the largest market opportunity, and fell to an Android team that was already responsible for the Android app and Android OTT product lines (Firestick and Roku).  Now we had a new platform:  a tablet experience not connected to any 3rd party store, with specific hardware requirements to update the software, initiate the correct experience, and receive data from both the bike and the user's heart rate monitor.  Additionally, we had to reconcile different methods of distilling user data between the three brands; all had worked a little differently in the past and this was an opportunity to unify and uplevel the various experiences.

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It was a great and exciting challenge.  We had great new data sources to integrate into the experience:  heart rate, bike resistance, minutes exercised, calories consumed, and all had to be reconciled with the holistic Beachbody ecosystem, particularly because we were also launching a cross-platform Gamification experience.

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Because Gamification is best when automated, much of the work involved is determining the rules of completion.  As a user, if I've done 50% or more of a workout, have I completed it?  Do I get credit?  What is the magic number?  When you encounter new product requirements like these, they are often inadvertantly intertwined with previous requirements, which adds complexity.  In the case of BODI, the logic determining when a video was completed was - much like scar tissue - tied to the logic of whether the video player was in a state of continuation or restart.  This is no trivial matter for a user - how annoying is it to return to a movie you were watching only to have it restart?  

 

We therefore had to reconcile how the video player worked and how progress was tracked cross platform to create a consistent user experience and set the table for Gamification.  We had to introduce and store new metrics for bike riders that were compatible with the metrics stored for users on other platforms.  We had to ensure the experience was relatively consistent between brands (in the event those brands would eventually be merged), and ensure that the same tablet delivered the correct brand experience, depending on your point and method of purchase.

 

One of the huge benefits of a 0-1 experience is that you are not dependent upon existing legacy code (except APIs, data storage, etc.) and can create a UX experience absent of previous technical constraints, often the case at large corporations where layers upon layers of coding build up over the years with little oversight.  In the case of the bike, we were able to introduce and display heart rate zones.  We came up with a compelling real time method of displaying which zone the user was currently in as well as the time spent in each zone.  

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Maintaining a heart rate while exercising is essential for heart health.  There is more heart benefit to consistently remaining above 140BPM for an extended period (i.e.; 30 min) than exercises that elevate the heart and then rest (i.e. sprint and recover).  A new UX successfully reflected the importance of the metric and integrated seamlessly into an intuitive, easy to digest summary of your workout progress over time.  

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From a UI perspective, we were able to take a very successful OTT rebrand exercise (that increased OTT views by over 50%) and apply it to the bike, a similar form factor.  In this way our bike and OTT experiences led the way for BODI in terms of rebrand quality.  

 

The most difficult component of the product were technical issues related to the relationship between hardware and software.  App teams can fall back on the well-tested technologies of the app itself (i.e.; Apple has built in bluetooth connectivity), while an independent tablet has firmware, operating system, and software updates that must be handled internally.  Connecting the Heart Rate Monitor, connecting the bike to the internet, connecting the pedal sensors, and so forth are a core part of the user experience and essential to first time usage.  Those are the most important details that, if executed well, lead to a delightful experience (and, if executed poorly, very much the opposite).  

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To get these aspects of the user experience right, significant coordination was necessary between cross-functional teams and brands.   Because of the overlap between three brands and really three separate companies, it was a highly collaborative product that benefited greatly from aligning approaches to solving common problems.  

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Was the bike a success?  As much as I'd love to say yes, the release was significantly complicated by the supply chain issues that impacted so many industries during COVID.  Many bikes sat on cargo ships off of Long Beach, waiting to be offloaded, for months on end.  This was also the time that similar brands (Peloton) were getting hammered by slowing sales as consumers returned to the gym.  In short, larger factors (post-COVID user behavioral patterns of returning to in person exercise experiences vs. at home experiences) prevented the bike from being the success it was hoped for.

 

That said, the rebranded UX and UI of the bike tablet served as the gold standard for BODI and was eventually adopted cross-platform (web and mobile apps).  It provided an early vision of where the product was going from a UX and brand perspective and helped define the full rebranding efforts that subsequently followed.