Case Study / 01 — Tip-Off
Season 2026
Rebuilding a stalling workout app into a momentum machine — a training companion that keeps athletes on a streak, on tempo, and in the game.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
12 Weeks
Platform
iOS & Android
Team
Courtside Studio
02 — Tip-Off
Tempo had the workouts — it just couldn’t keep anyone in the game.
Sign-ups were strong, but momentum died fast. New athletes finished day one fired up and quietly disappeared by week two. The product treated every session as a fresh start instead of building a streak worth protecting — so the habit never took hold.
68%
dropped off before week two
1.4x
sessions per week, then flat
03 — Reading the Defense
Before drawing a play, we studied why athletes walked off the court.
24 exit interviews
Athletes who churned all described the same thing: starting over every Monday with nothing to show for last week.
One recurring quote
“I’d miss two days and the app made me feel like I was back at zero — so I just stopped opening it.”
The data backed it up
Streaks broke at the 9-day mark, and 7 in 10 never recovered. Progress felt invisible the moment a session was skipped.
The old app felt like a coach who forgot everything I did yesterday. I needed something that remembered the work and pushed me to keep the run alive.
Maya Okonkwo
Beta athlete, 14-month member
04 — Court Vision
Four breakdowns we had to defend against.
Mapping the research into the specific product failures that were costing momentum.
P1
No memory of momentum
Every session opened the same: a blank slate. Nothing carried the weight of a 12-day streak forward, so consistency felt unrewarded.
P2
Progress hid in menus
Personal records and trends lived three taps deep. Athletes finished a workout and saw nothing change on the surface they actually looked at.
P3
Skipping felt terminal
Miss a day and the streak counter reset to zero. The product punished a normal life instead of helping athletes recover the rhythm.
P4
Coaching had no voice
Plans were static PDFs in disguise. There was no sense of a coach reading the defense and adjusting the next play with you.
05 — Game Plan
We set three plays to win back momentum.
01
Make momentum visible
Put the streak, tempo, and personal bests on the first screen — progress an athlete feels the second they open the app.
02
Forgive the missed day
Replace the hard reset with streak insurance and recovery runs, so a skipped session becomes a comeback, not a failure.
03
Give the coach a voice
Turn static plans into adaptive playbooks that respond to performance and speak to the athlete between sessions.
06 — Play Development
How we ran the playbook from sketch to ship.
1
Week 1–2
Mapping the floor
Service blueprint and journey mapping with churned and retained athletes side by side, isolating the exact moments momentum slipped.
2
Week 3–6
Sketching the plays
Low-fi flows and a streak-first information architecture, pressure-tested in five rapid rounds of moderated concept testing.
3
Week 7–9
Building the system
A momentum-driven design system — streak rings, tempo meters, recovery states — handed to engineering as a live component kit.
4
Week 10–12
Scrimmage & ship
A two-week closed beta with 120 athletes, instrumented end-to-end, tuning thresholds before the staged production rollout.
07 — Executing the Play
A training companion built around the run you don’t want to break.
Momentum moved to the surface. The home screen now leads with the streak, the tempo, and the next play — and it forgives you when life gets in the way.
Streak rings
The first thing you see: a tempo ring that fills with every session and pulses when you’re close to extending the run.
Recovery runs
Miss a day and the app offers a 10-minute recovery session that protects the streak instead of erasing it.
Adaptive playbook
Plans react to your last performance, nudging weight, reps, and rest — a coach reading the defense in real time.
08 — HALFTIME ADJUSTMENTS
BEFORE
The old game
The original Tempo app dropped users onto a blank screen with no momentum. Finding progress meant digging through menus — by which point most users had already dropped off.
Before Screen
✕
Home screen opened on an empty workout list
✕
Streaks reset to zero after a single missed day
✕
Progress buried three taps deep in a stats menu
✕
Static plans that never reacted to performance
AFTER
The new game
The redesign puts the streak and tempo ring front and center from the first tap. Every session ends with a personal best and an adapted plan ready to go.
After Screen
✓
Home screen leads with the live streak and tempo ring
✓
Streak insurance and recovery runs keep the run alive
✓
Personal bests surface the moment a session ends
✓
Adaptive playbook tunes the next session automatically
09 — Final Score
Ninety days after launch, the numbers were on the board.
+58%
30-day retention
up from 31%
2.6x
weekly active sessions
per athlete
−42%
week-two drop-off
fewer churned
4.8★
App Store rating
from 11k reviews
10 — Post-Game Analysis
What this season taught the team.
01
Momentum beats motivation
Athletes didn’t need louder reminders — they needed proof their effort was compounding. Visible momentum did more for retention than any push notification.
02
Forgiveness is a feature
The streak-insurance mechanic was the single biggest lever. Designing for the missed day, not the perfect day, is what kept athletes coming back.
03
Ship the smallest scoreboard
We almost over-built the analytics. The simplest possible progress surface outperformed the rich dashboard in every round of testing.
11 — Continue the Season
Got a product that’s losing momentum? Let’s draw up the next play.
Courtside partners with teams who want their product to feel like it’s on a winning streak.