Nike+ FuelBand

Nike+ was an experiment that revolutionized sport. With its launch seven years ago, we started a journey with Nike that has taken them from a company that manufactures shoes and apparel, to a company that makes products and services.

Nike+ tapped into a community of runners with an existing behavior. Elite runners use the Nike+ platform to track their runs. We created a functional platform for athletes who wanted to understand their performance and improve on it. But even though Nike+ was a phenomenon for athletes worldwide, it wasn’t optimizing its audience.

We saw a greater opportunity in bringing performance tracking to the masses. But the question was: How do we bring Nike+ to a larger audience? How do we get people to adopt a new behavior?

In order to bring Nike+ to the masses, we didn’t just launch a new productwe transformed the way people measure performance by introducing a new metric called Nike Fuel. For the first time, the Nike+ FuelBand lets anyone who’s active to compare themselves with anyone else.

Nike’s mission has always been to help athletes around the world improve their performance. With the big success of Nike+, we saw how the power of data can create strong ties between the Nike brand and its customers. But until we developed FuelBand, Nike+ was only available a to a very specific target: the hardcore runner.

Until now, there had never been a way to measure activity. The closest metric was calories, but not very accurate due to the fact that people burn calories at different rates based on their size, body type, and metabolism.

Nike believes that if you have a body, you’re an athlete. In its former state, Nike+ was missing out on this crucial everyday athlete audience. Opening the experience up to the everyday athlete presented new challenges we didn’t encounter in our previous work on Nike+. Instead of only tracking performance in a specific sport or activity, we had to develop a way to track performance in a more general way. Rather than servicing existing behaviorssuch as the desire to understand how fast or long you ranwe had to encourage new behaviors amongst our audience to motivate them to be more active.

When the FuelBand became available online for pre-order, the demand was so high it sold out within minutes. Once the FuelBand was available at Niketown, customers lined up around the block before doors opened. Global demand continues to increase, with more people registering to be notified when the FuelBand is available in their market.

FuelBand is transforming how we measure performance, it’s transforming how agencies and companies collaborate to bring a product and service to market, and it’s transforming Nike as an organization. It represents a real shift for Nike: now they create products and services that become part of people’s everyday lives. From the Fuel metric itself, to the mobile and social integration, and ultimately the launch of the FuelBand, Nike is forming relationships with active people of all types, from elite athletes to the everyday user.

We created FuelBand with the goal of getting people to be more active. While designing the overarching user experience, our internal mantra was: Wallet, keys, phone, FuelBand. In order to be successful and keep people motivated, it had to become an indispensable part of their daily routine. Second, FuelBand had to be fun, motivational, and personal.

Setting a daily goal drives the entire Fuelband experience. The beauty of the daily goal is its simplicity: set the amount of Fuel you want to earn every day and watch as the LED lights on the Fuelband turn from red, to yellow, and when you reach your goal, green.

At the end of the day, you can sync your Fuel via the USB built into the FuelBand or wirelessly, via Bluetooth. Online, data visualizations show where you were most active daily, weekly, monthly, and beyond. If you meet your goal, animations celebrate your performance. Hit your goal consistently, Fuelie shows up to cheer you on.

Logging in with your Facebook profile personalizes the experience. Friends who use FuelBand show up on your leaderboard. Seeing how you stack up provides even more motivation.