Under Armour
Reaching alignment on the wearable experience
Working together to connect the dots between wearable technologies, digital applications and services to create a more cohesive experience.
Services
Service Design / Strategy / Facilitation / Research / Design Sprint
Sector
Lifestyle / Athletics
Challenge
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic everyone was grappling with how to adapt their products and services to the newly introduced 'work from home' paradigm. Under Armour (UA), one of the leading athletic wear companies in the US, was no different and wanted to explore how they could leverage their ecosystem of wearables, digital applications, services and partnerships to improve the experience of working out at home.
UA's ecosystem is very broad and encompassing but by focusing on the customer problems first, we were able to quickly hone in on three specific problems to target:
_How might we help athletes know what to do, how to do it, and what to do next?
_How might we inspire them to keep working out?
_How might we make working out less of a hassle?
Any exploration also had to consider the current UA ecosystem of digital applications, wearables on the market and even developing technologies that they hadn't yet found the right application for.
Approach
This was a project with a high level of ambiguity, complexity and need for speed. To address this we used a mixed method approach of strategic research and a modified Design Sprint.
Research:
Our main approach to sifting through the ambiguity was to build a contextual map to help us gather and organize all of the data so that we could formulate the problems we needed to solve. In this case we exclusively used secondary data mined from current insight databases, competitive benchmarking, product portfolios and internal interviews.
After collecting and organizing our data we had a pretty good idea of the context and could formulate the problems to solve. Because we weren't doing any generative research with customers directly, we made sure to check our assumptions and rate the evidence for our conclusions as we went.
The Sprint
Once we had formulated the problems to solve we facilitated a 3 day workshop with stakeholders from customer experience, product, marketing, design and engineering. In this workshop we used Google Design Sprint methodologies to introduce the context and problems, sketch potential solutions, align on a direction to explore deeper and ultimately plan the next steps to start moving toward prototyping that solution.
Below is a sample of the type of work that came from the sprint:
Outcome
The sprint was a hit and we successfully navigated the ambiguity to kick off the exploration of combining several current and developing technologies and potential partnerships to create a better multi-channel experience. From here teams had a direction to go. Possibly the greatest value that came out of the sprint, however, was the multi functional alignment on the need to consolidate and simplify UA's digital portfolio and explore ideas to connect those digital experiences to clothing in ways that fit into customers existing habits.
Since this project in 2020, Under Armour has shifted their strategy to rely more on partnerships to create wearable experiences and have consolidated much of their digital portfolio into just 3 apps by discontinuing or selling off redundant systems.
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