UN1T

Giving international gym members fitness tools in the palm of their hands

UN1T is a franchise of gyms and fitness centres across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, specialising in group fitness classes. They wanted to provide members of franchisee gyms with a way to set and track fitness goals, book classes and monitor health and wellbeing metrics: a single source of truth across their large network which would build community and motivate members, instructors and gym owners.

The Challenge

UN1T is an international brand, with diverse members in differing geographic locations. We needed to build a flexible platform that would support custom installations, languages and features, whilst working to a limited budget and timeframe. The start of the project coincided with the initial reopening of gyms after the first Covid-19 lockdowns, which gave an added impetus to UN1T’s desire to give their members more value from their gym memberships outside the studio.

What We Did

We provided both general and technical Discovery, additional consultations with a product owner, project management, design and back- and frontend development.

Insights

The most important aspects of this project were:

Maximising the capabilities of the model to provide online, remote services
Researching competitor apps to ensure we delivered the right feature set
Accommodating cultural and geographical differences

Meeting GDPR and facial recognition requirements
Providing a robust architecture and implementing APIs seamlessly
Delivering the prioritised feature set to meet UN1T’s changing business needs

The Approach

UN1T came to us with a detailed brief of their overall goal for the app and the features that they wanted to include. To kick off the process we had a meeting with the client team to understand the key goals for the app and how they fit within the existing business needs of UN1T and the timelines for launch.

Following this meeting our product owner prioritised the features, identifying what was essential for the MVP and creating an initial scope for the first phase of development. Throughout this process they worked closely with the client to ensure it fit their goals and the development team to ensure that the scope was feasible in the initial timeline.

We then went through a process of digging deeper into the key features. Our product owner used user flows and wireframes to detail the specific functionalities for the key features Bookings, Nutrition and Performance Tracking, whilst our technical lead carried out Discovery on the APIs we would use to clarify what was possible.

Following that, a Project Architecture meeting was held where the Development stage processes were ironed out and scrum ceremonies were agreed on. We worked in 2 week sprints, each culminating in a Sprint Review / Demo meeting to review progress and test out the ready screens. The project was delivered in 5 months by a team of five.

The tech

GraphQL
React Native
PHP + Symfony

PostgreSQL
Backend running on AWS

Challenges

The brief was conceived pre-Covid-19, and as pivoting online became increasingly relevant we had to make sure we future-proofed the platform for an uncertain year.
Providing flexible and cost-effective architecture which meets current project requirements and future developments at the same time
Identifying the crucial components of the system which need to be delivered within the first version of the product
Adapting to geographic and linguistic variations
Meeting requirements for data privacy and facial recognition across iOs and Android

Results

The UN1T platform is expected to launch in Q1 2021