In the summer of 2020, I worked as the lead designer for the minimum viable product of Stride, a running app that uses the same location technology as Run an Empire.
In Stride, thousands of neighbouring players compete for control over a specific piece of land, encouraging people to get out and move - whether that’s walking to work, training for a marathon, or hiking at the weekend.
We’d learned through user research at Run an Empire that some users loved the core mechanics of Run an Empire, but wanted a more competitive and running-focused product. I was part of a small team that was set up to discover how a product like that could work.
With limited time to validate the idea, I created wireframes of how users would interact with the app and each other, working closely with the development team to understand what was possible.
I then started to build some clickable prototypes in Figma which allowed us to create a shared understanding of the minimum viable product and how we could deliver it. We then had a week to build a playable prototype.
To speed things up I started to build the UI directly inside the game engine. This meant the lead developer and I worked closely together over the week-long sprint.
After the week we had a product that we could put into the hands of users. We sent it out to a small group of people for testing and conducted usability interviews. We used the insights from this to iterate on the product to make it a better fit with users’ existing running behaviour and ultimately make it more competitive - adding new features like Strava integration and leaderboards.
In a short space of time, working closely together we were able to validate a successful minimum viable product. Since Stride launched on the App Store it has seen a growing user base of dedicated users and has received additional funding. It currently has a 4.7 star rating.
