Force USA

Force USA is a US manufacturer of functional strength equipment, best known for its all-in-one trainers, racks, and leg machines for home and commercial gyms. The brand also runs the Force USA Training App, which gives owners of its equipment personalized programs, progress tracking, and a library of exercise videos.

Key insights about Force USA

Challenge

The main challenge in creating the Force USA application is the very short development time. It would seem that making an application from scratch in 4 and a half months is something unrealistic. Therefore, the development process of this application is slightly different from the conventional one. We will talk about this in more detail in the Solutions section.

Another difficulty that we encountered in the development of the application is the creation of additional functionality for the CMS. The client application implied the presence of a "Content Management System". With the help of which it was possible to add and change the content of the application in real-time. We needed a solution that would allow coaches to quickly make changes.

Process

Force USA application development process was slightly different from the classic development process. We design, develop and test each new application functionality.

The classic approach to application development is the Waterfall model or the Waterfall method (when each subsequent stage is executed only when the previous one is completely completed). The first is design, then development, testing, and release of the project.

In order to meet the short deadlines, we divided the project into parts, and combined all these stages for each of the parts. That is, at first there was a UI for one functionality, then the development and testing of this functionality immediately started after it. While the development and testing of the first functionality were underway, we were drawing and approving the UI for the next one, and so on.

Test builds reach testers through Firebase App Distribution. On release, backend changes go out first, together with the CMS and API when new data structures are added.

7 members of the Stormotion team worked on this app: 3 developers, 2 UI/UX designers, 1 QA engineer, and 1 project manager.

Solution

In addition to a different approach to the development of the application, it was impossible to add all the functionality in such a short time. Therefore, our team came up with a very cool marketing ploy. We have developed all the basic functions of the application and released it. And on the additional functionality, they put a sign “Сoming soon”. Thus, the user understands that new features will be added to the application. Thanks to this waiting effect, the user does not lose interest in the application.

Let's return to our additional functionality for the CMS. At the beginning of development, we decided to use Hygraph CMS. This is a great service for storing content (pictures, videos, and so on). But during the development process, the amount of content went beyond the free subscription, and the paid subscription went beyond the budget. In addition, it was inconvenient for Force USA coaches to introduce new training programs into this CMS.

Therefore, the Stormotion team made an importer that automatically took all the information we needed from the Google Spreadsheet document and loaded it into the CMS system in the right categories. Thanks to this, we have reduced the content loading time (which affected the development time of the application) and made the process of adding content more convenient for the owner and trainers of the application.