Year
2025
Role
Mobile Designer, Strategist, Motion Designer
Product Duration
4 Months
Over the past 20+ years pursuing high performance in running, I've seen firsthand the transformative power of training. The way you can use it to shape yourself into the version of yourself that you want to be. As a coach, I've seen the gap between a person's goals and their deeper why. This mismatch can create friction that leads to discontent, frustration, and burnout. As a designer I saw an opportunity to help folks close that gap by gaining clarity and building structures that support their deepest motivations for running.
Design is not a matter of developing then applying, it's developing through application. This was the feedback I received early in this project from a mentor that helped me break out of a rigid interpretation of the design process. My initial designs were trying to retrofit the app to fit the initial branding I'd chosen for the project. Loosening my grip let my intuition and iteration back in and the work flowed again. I was able to experiment much more with motion. The results felt so much more inspired and dynamic, which was crucial for an inspiring and dynamic concept.
Training shapes the way you see yourself and the world, so it's an ideal vehicle for personal development. Current training solutions only support the scheduling of workouts and monitoring of injuries, focusing exclusively on physical training. Tehlos is positioned to fill this gap by offering athletes by expanding that support to create a safe place for athletes to train the mental side of the game.
Working with a sports psychologist, it became clear that intentionality is the metric of sustainable success. With that in mind I set about making intentionality visible in training. The old adage "what gets measured gets managed" rings true in the athletic world and I wanted to give athletes a way to visualize the quality of their intention in their training from a single session to a season.
To support the self knowledge that mental training requires, I built in reflection prompts. These prompts are designed to cultivate understanding of concepts that can help athletes reframe their approach and boost sustainable performance.
Reflections to explore performance concepts
Truly serving a community requires meeting people where they are. I designed a curriculum of physical and mental training concepts to scaffold understanding for athletes that might be less familiar with high performance. This is a toolbox that users can explore and experiment with in training.
Scaffolding Principles to support the why
This project helped me evolve my design process: Journaling, articulating decisions, and creating project specific design principles. It also reinforced my belief in design as a tool for internal transformation. I want to build systems that result in the users goals being reached while reducing their cognitive load. This project was a fun opportunity to marry two of my greatest passions, running and design, in a way that embodies a systems view.
