My name is Nolan, and I’m the Digital Product Design Manager here at FORM. I’ve been designing digital experiences for our goggles and mobile app over the past 5.5 years.

You can’t design a good product without testing it, and like many FORM employees, I’m an avid user. I’m proud to claim membership in FORM’s Million Meter Club, with an all-time distance of 1,092,544 m, and 867 total swims (and counting). With a FORM Score of 58, I’m a fairly average swimmer, but working closely on the product and using the FORM goggles inspired me to train for and complete my first Ironman triathlon in the fall of 2024, something I only dreamed of before joining the team.

Designing the FORM experience is a complex challenge, but also an exciting one. We have exciting design problems to solve, and although we don’t always get it right, when we do solve them for our users, it’s incredibly satisfying.

Our ultimate goal is to design a product that provides the best possible value to our users. We want Premium to deliver unparalleled value through features that are genuinely useful and make swimming more fun and engaging. It’s what we work toward every day. One thing that helps us achieve this goal is a philosophy that has been core to the FORM product from day one: we don’t start with a novel technology and then look for problems to solve with it. We start with a real problem our users face and work to solve it using the unique technological solutions available to us.

This has been our philosophy from the start, and it guided the design of our latest update, HeadCoach™ 2.0. To mark the launch of HeadCoach™ 2.0, we wanted to share the story of the design process behind this update, giving a peek behind the curtain to show how new software features move from idea to reality at FORM.

Origins of HeadCoach™ 2.0

Let’s start at the beginning. The idea behind HeadCoach™ has been part of FORM since day one. Our founder, Dan, always envisioned the goggles as a tool that could help swimmers improve their technique through real-time visual feedback. As an elite swimmer himself, he understood how hard it is to develop better technique. He saw the potential for FORM to give swimmers the kind of guidance they’ve traditionally struggled to access.

We released the first version of HeadCoach™ on October 31, 2023. It introduced FORM Score—our measure of swimming efficiency—along with the full suite of HeadCoach metrics: Head Pitch, Peak Head Roll, Time-to-Neutral, Interval Pacing, and Set Pacing. The launch also included four Skill Modes in the goggles, one for each metric except Time-to-Neutral, which arrived a bit later. Version 1.0 also offered a “Recommended Focus,” highlighting a specific aspect of a swimmer’s technique to pay closer attention to.

The first version of HeadCoach™ resulted from more than a year of design and engineering, including months of concept exploration, prototyping, refinement, user testing, and development. Despite the project's scale and the number of features, version 1.0 represented only a fraction of the experience the team had envisioned. As is often the case, even on launch day, we knew there was much more to come.

Just two weeks later, on November 14, 2023, we held our first jam session exploring what version 2.0 could become. This was when we first discussed the core idea that would later become HeadCoach™ 2.0. The conversation emerged from a collaborative discussion between Product Management, Design (myself), Engineering, and our Head of Coaching Science, Brian Johns.

A core design principle behind HeadCoach™ has always been to coach swimmers in as human-like a way as possible, mirroring the approach a world-class coach would take. From the earliest conversations about HeadCoach™ 2.0, we knew we wanted to stay anchored to this idea.

In version 1.0, we provided users with skill scores, new metrics to track, goggles modes to practice in the pool, and basic recommendations. It delivered one of the most sophisticated technique assessments available without a human coach—but it still required swimmers to do the hard part themselves. They had to review and interpret their own data, track how their scores changed, identify correlations between metrics, and distill their own insights.

We’ve consistently heard from swimmers who feel overwhelmed when trying to improve their technique. They know there are countless things they could work on, but don’t know which to prioritize, so they try to fix everything at once and end up improving nothing. HeadCoach™ 1.0 didn’t provide sufficient support for these swimmers.

Our vision for version 2.0 was that HeadCoach™ would do the work for the swimmer: analyzing the data, identifying meaningful relationships between metrics, and—guided by established coaching principles—surfacing only the most important insight for a swimmer to focus on—one clear, prioritized message at a time.

We drew inspiration from other apps with features that delivered distilled, high-impact insights, including WHOOP, Strava (Athlete Intelligence), Sleep Cycle, and others. While some examples we reviewed appeared to offer questionable value—highlighting the technology without providing deeper insight—they were nevertheless instructive. Their approaches reinforced our confidence in simplifying information and making it feel effortlessly actionable.

After these initial discussions, brainstorming, competitive analysis, and rough concept exploration, we had a clear sense of where we wanted to go with the project. However, at that time, it was necessary to set the work aside temporarily to focus on other roadmap features scheduled for spring.

Concept Development and Early Prototyping

I returned to the project in June 2024 and began developing a rough design concept. We reviewed that first concept on June 27, 2024. Even in its early form, it contained the foundational elements of what would eventually become HeadCoach™ 2.0.

The core structure was already in place: a single key insight from the user’s most recent swim, highlighted directly on the Home tab; an insight detail screen that explained the finding and visualized the data behind it; and a suggested focus for the user’s next swim, also surfaced on the Home tab alongside their upcoming workout. Each suggestion was linked to its own detail screen that explained why it was selected and how it connected to the swimmer’s broader development. Both the insight and the focus were driven by the user’s Objective, along with their HeadCoach™ data and their scores.

Throughout July and August 2024, I continued iterating on the concept, testing different variants internally with FORM employees and refining the experience based on their feedback.

However, at the beginning of September, a shift in company strategy required us to pause work on HeadCoach™ 2.0 again to prioritize other initiatives, including swimmer Objective and race date capture, which would eventually enable the development of the HeadCoach™ Plans feature.

User Research

We began revisiting the idea of “HeadCoach™ Insights” (as we were calling it at the time) in November, as we kicked off a round of user research focused on our Premium offering. The initial goals of this research were twofold: first, to understand why some users do not try Premium features during their free trial; and second, to understand why users who do try Premium features might stop using them.

The first goal was to ensure that our Premium features were appealing, relevant, and aligned with how users actually use their FORM goggles. For example, a guided workout experience has limited value for a swimmer who already has a coach on deck guiding every session. The second goal focused on a different question: if Premium features were clearly compatible with a user’s training context, why weren’t they continuing to use them after trying them?

Both lines of inquiry ultimately aimed at the same outcome: learning how to make Premium more valuable, and ideally indispensable, for our users.

To support this work, we conducted several surveys throughout November and December of 2024. Based on the survey responses, we recruited participants for a series of user interviews, which I conducted in January and early February 2025. We accelerated the interview schedule so we could complete them ahead of a design workshop we’d been invited to at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, ensuring we had these learnings top of mind going into that session (more on this later).

The user interviews surfaced several important themes. Most swimmers genuinely want to improve their technique and have already found value in some HeadCoach™ features, but many struggle to translate complex data into clear, actionable steps. They expressed a desire for FORM to take on more of the analytical heavy lifting so they wouldn’t need to interpret scores, compare metrics, or identify patterns themselves. Instead, they wanted a simpler, more guided experience—one key insight to take away from each swim and one specific thing to focus on next. Several users also referenced early AI-driven coaching tools in other apps, such as Strava. They were intrigued by the idea of FORM offering a similar, more intelligent layer of coaching.

Quotes from User Interviews:

This type of user feedback brought the project back to the front of our minds. It was added to the product roadmap for later in the year, slotting in amongst all other priorities. That was the state of things as we headed to Cupertino for a design workshop with Apple.

Apple Design Workshop

The design workshop took place at Apple headquarters from February 11–13, 2025. FORM sent a cross-functional team with representatives from Design, Engineering, and Product Management. The workshop was organized and led by Apple’s Design Evangelism Team, who guided us through a series of activities to refine and strengthen our product direction through a focused, user-centric process.

One of the core exercises was an experience-mapping session informed by the user research we had completed earlier. This helped us visually chart the journey swimmers take to improve their technique and identify the pain points they encounter along the way. Seeing these challenges laid out so clearly reaffirmed that the Insights project—what would become HeadCoach™ 2.0—was a meaningful and worthwhile investment of our time and resources.

We also completed a rough sketching and wireframing exercise that allowed us to evolve the experience from where we left it in September 2024. In addition, a detailed review of our existing app experience on Apple devices identified several further improvements we could make. These enhancements were not directly related to the Insights components but were important refinements that ultimately became part of the broader HeadCoach™ 2.0 release.

Restarting Design Work

We didn’t jump back into the project right after returning from Cupertino, as we still had other work to finish. But by the second half of March 2025, I began easing back into it—revisiting the ideas we had explored with Apple and sketching out new versions of the designs.

In April, I updated the user flows (the step-by-step paths a swimmer would take through the feature) and built a new interactive prototype that reflected these changes. I tested this prototype in the office with FORM employees, gathered feedback, revised it, and tested again. Through this process, we continued improving the designs based on what we learned.

Throughout April and early May, we reviewed the evolving designs with the Product team, engineers, and Customer Service several times to make sure the experience made sense from every angle—what the user sees, how the system works behind the scenes, and how support teams would explain it if needed. Each review led to tweaks and improvements.

Testing Content First

Even with all the design iterations, one thing we knew from the beginning was that the feature would not succeed—would not be valuable to users—if the insights it provided weren’t actually insightful. The content presented through the design needed to give swimmers an understanding of their technique that a) they could not easily discover on their own without in-depth analysis, and b) translated into clear, actionable, and practical advice.

Because this was so critical, we wanted to test our coaching content as early as possible—well before development was complete and even before the design was finalized. To do this, we created a “HeadCoach™ Insights” email that mimicked the content users would eventually receive in the app. We began by sending these emails to FORM employees who regularly swam, and later expanded the testing group to include trusted external testers. Their feedback helped us refine the content and the design over several months before any test version of the app existed.

This approach proved essential. It allowed us to significantly improve content quality, refine the logic for determining which insights were delivered, and build confidence that users would find the guidance genuinely valuable.

Areas of Focus

On the goggles, we made several adjustments to the start-of-swim flow to reduce the number of user inputs at the beginning of a session. We also added a screen that repeats the HeadCoach™ suggestion and tip shown earlier in the app, ensuring it’s fresh in the user’s mind as they begin their swim.

Another part of HeadCoach™ 1.0 that we reevaluated and revised was the “Recommended Focus” feature. Based on feedback from users and FORM employees who swam frequently, we found that this concept simply wasn’t resonating. The term “Recommended Focus” was vague and forgettable, and it was often confused with the “Top Priority” label we used to highlight the HeadCoach™ Skill metric where a swimmer scored the lowest.

The original intent behind Recommended Focus was to group users based on common patterns in their FORM Score, DPS, stroke rate, and pace data. With that in mind, we revisited an earlier idea and reframed Recommended Focuses as “Swimmer Types.” We believe this name better reflects the concept of categorizing swimmers by shared traits and is more memorable.

We also made several changes to the Swim Detail screen. In addition to adding the new HeadCoach™ insight element, we used this opportunity to simplify the overall design. The screen included several sub-sections that had been part of the app since FORM's earliest days but had become less valuable to most users—for example, the SWOLF table. Rather than removing these elements entirely, we chose to deprioritize them and move them to the bottom of the screen.

We also removed certain metrics from the top section that were considered less important, to create a cleaner, more focused experience. Not all users have viewed this as a positive change, and we’ll continue to monitor feedback and assess whether any adjustments are needed.

We also made significant changes to the HeadCoach™ Metric screens, some prompted by feedback from our contacts at Apple during the design workshop. In addition to several visual refinements, the main update removed the tab system that had kept educational content hidden for many users. We kept the educational content but redesigned the layout so it could be accessed simply by scrolling down the screen. We also simplified both the metric visualization and the five-swim average trend section to make these screens easier to read and understand.

Design Sign-Off

A significant milestone came at the beginning of May, when we officially signed off on the overall user experience. This meant we were confident the feature worked as intended and that the flow was ready for engineering to begin building.

The visual design—the look and feel of the screens—was already well developed by that point, but I spent the next few weeks polishing the details and then moving into “production mode.” This involved working through all the edge cases—the unusual or less common situations a user might encounter—and defining how the design should adapt across different device types (iOS vs. Android) and screen sizes. For a product like this, there are many different scenarios to consider, with some screens ending up needing dozens of variations, and with a feature this large, that can result in hundreds of mockups.

Implementation

Although Engineering had been part of many discussions and design reviews earlier in the process, we formally kicked off engineering work on May 27, 2025. I continued supporting the engineering team throughout June and July, making design adjustments based on their feedback as implementation progressed.

At the same time, we were still gathering feedback on the HeadCoach™ content we had been testing through email. That feedback prompted changes to both the content structure and how we deliver it in the app. After running additional prototype tests with the revised content in July, we made further updates to the design.

The first engineering demo of the Insights experience in the app took place on July 31, 2025. Two weeks later, we conducted our first internal test build that FORM employees could use with their own goggles and phones.

11th Hour Revisions

Once we gained hands-on experience with the feature in real-world swimming conditions and as part of our regular routines, new issues inevitably surfaced. At FORM, we don’t release an update we’re not fully satisfied with just to meet a launch date. We wanted to take the experience from good to great, so we delayed the launch to give ourselves time to make the final revisions

One of the areas requiring the most attention was data visualization for the new consistency metrics (e.g., FORM Score Consistency, Stroke Rate Consistency, DPS Consistency). These concepts were new to users and somewhat difficult to grasp. The consistency layer added complexity on top of standard metrics like DPS, and this complexity increased further when an insight focused on a specific type of interval, such as high- or low-intensity intervals or short- or long-distance intervals.

Typically, when a swimmer completes a multi-length interval, metrics such as FORM Score, stroke rate, and DPS tend to decline as fatigue sets in and technique deteriorates. Our initial visualizations of these consistency metrics didn’t clearly show this decline, making them harder for test users to interpret. To address this, we developed a new visualization style that illustrates the drop-off much more clearly.

We used real data from FORM employees and test participants and leveraged new AI tools to generate updated visualizations. We also made supporting changes to the naming strategy, screen layout, educational content, and overall visual design. These updates were tested with users in prototype form to assess whether they improved understanding of the new metrics.

By the end of October, after a few rounds of iteration and the addition of several new educational screens, we were confident that the metrics were now easier for users to understand (although there is certainly still room for improvement). After a few more weeks of development, we were finally ready to release HeadCoach™ 2.0 to the public on November 6, 2025, marking the end of a process that began almost exactly two years earlier.

This release isn’t the end. We plan to watch, listen, and learn how users engage with the feature—what they like, what they don’t, what we missed, and what we may have gotten wrong—and use that feedback to help shape what HeadCoach™ 3.0 becomes. Our goal remains to deliver meaningful value to swimmers, and we’ll continue exploring, testing, and iterating on new ways to provide even more value in the future.