“I still see people at the gym all the time using a pen and paper to write down their workouts, including personal trainers.”
That’s how Alex Papanicholas felt about his experience tracking gym workouts.
Alex goes to the gym a lot, and has tried out a ton of mobile apps to help him track his fitness progress, but he’s never found one that he could actually use that was simple enough.
Alex came to Crew with this idea and some early sketches of how he wanted the app to work. He was looking for an experienced iPhone developer who could help deliver a quality product that could keep the product focused on simplicity.
In a day, Alex was matched with Brandon Trebitowski, a talented iPhone developer from Crew. Brandon has built over 40 iOS apps for clients like Google and was excited about working with Alex on his project.
The initial plan for Fitlist was to create a checklist for fitness. The sketches looked basic, but that’s what Alex was going for – an “elegant” yet simple way to track workouts.
“Too many apps have feature overload, so we wanted to start out with a couple of basic features, do them extremely well and then only add on things that are absolutely necessary.”
During the creation process, Alex mentioned that one of the biggest challenges was making sure the app was extremely usable during a workout.
For instance, can you easily enter numbers if your phone is inside an armband?
How should the tracking buttons be placed in the app to make it easy for you to quickly enter a number and move on with your workout?
Since Alex and Brandon both had similar issues tracking workouts at the gym, most of these questions were answered by testing a first version of the app during a workout.
Alex mentioned that tracking workout sets is also one of the most difficult things to master because you have many variables changing quickly with every single exercise: number of sets, weight, time, reps, etc.
The Fitlist website — fitlist.fitmobi.com
Alex and Brandon will continue working on the app to help you track complicated workout metrics, and give you an easy-to-view breakdown of your progress, making it easier to stay on track with your fitness goals.
“We haven’t tackled circuit training and supersets yet, but we have plans to help make these sorts of training exercises much easier to track.”
Finished product
Effortlessly add excercises, create workouts, review past workouts, and more.
