BC-Use-Case

Apple Watch Integration for the App Bike Citizens

2022 • 2 months • 1 iOS-dev, 1 backend-dev, 1 UX-designer

Bike Citizens is a navigation-app for cyclists available for iOS and Android with around 100.000 active users. With Apple just having announced their Apple Watch Ultra we wanted to offer a simple yet effective integration for Apple Watch and Healthkit.

We worked in a small and agile team of 2 devs and me and planned on releasing a minimum viable product as fast as possible. 

For this we first got an Apple Watch for the iOS-developer and one for the designer and startet testing what it can do. I also started learning as much as possible about best practices and competitor products. 

  1. After this we sat together and agreed on only releasing the possibilty to start and stop tracking with information on duration, distance and heartrate in our first version.
  2. The devs started with backend and the connection to Apple Health while I drew out a first prototype of the app and presented it within the company. 
  3. When the dev presented a first working version of the prototype we quickly deployed it to our test app and got as many people to test it as we could.
  4. I continuosly tested the app, gave feedback and prepared everything for the release like translations and visuals for the App Store.
  5. We set up a live-ticker to get notified whenever someone uploads a track from their Apple Watch to closely monitor the new feature.

After getting rid of all obvious bugs and getting a working product we released it without announcing the new feature to see if any serious bugs were reported before announcing it and sending out push-messages.

What I learned:

  • It was surprising how many people started immediately importing hundreds of tracks from Apple Health.
  • How awesome lean product design can be.
  • Designing Interfaces for smartwatches and what to look out for.
  • Organizing the release of a new feature and communicating it to users and within the company
BC-Use-Case2