RunLab
2025
Deliverables
Discovery Interview · User Flows · Wireframes · Prototypes · High-Fidelity UI · Developer Handoff
Industry
Health & Fitness · Consumer Mobile · Sports Tech
Tools
Figma · ChatGPT · SORA
Competitive running is locked behind entry fees, fixed race dates, and geography. Most runners train consistently but never compete, because competing means being in a specific city on a specific morning. The founder's insight was simple: bring the race to the runner. My job was designing an experience that felt like a real competition, real stakes, real rankings, real prizes, without any of the logistics of a physical event. The catch: a digital race has no crowd, no finish line, no energy. If the app didn't create that tension on its own, the product had no reason to exist.
The core question was how to keep runners coming back between races. A ranking alone wasn't enough, you check your position once and close the app. The answer was building the entire platform around a gamified points economy with real value: runners earn points through activity and engagement, and those points convert into discounts on future race entries. That decision changed the product's shape. Every run, every completed stage, every interaction feeds a loop where participating makes the next race cheaper, which makes you more likely to enter, which keeps the ranking alive and the competition real. It also solved the business side: rewards tied to future entries drive repeat purchases, not just retention metrics. The engagement system and the revenue model became the same thing.
The app launched on the App Store and Google Play, with nine updates shipped in the first six weeks, active post-launch iteration between design and engineering. The community grew to nearly 22,000 Instagram followers within two months, unusually fast traction for a new consumer sports product. The championship now runs 8 stages per season across 5 categories, with a no-subscription model where runners buy individual entries, exactly the purchase behavior the points economy was designed to reinforce.
Everything started with a structured discovery interview with the CEO and co-founder. The goal wasn't collecting a feature list, it was understanding how a national championship should feel from inside a runner's head: what makes competition feel real, what makes someone run again tomorrow. That interview shaped the ranking system, the category logic, and the points economy. From there I moved through wireframes, prototypes, and client presentations in agency sprint cycles, then delivered structured handoff to the engineering team that built and shipped it.
