The Challenge

Pioneer the use of blood glucose as a core sport nutrition datum.

Company Context

Supersapiens is the first company to commercialize a glucose monitor specifically meant for athletes.

My Role

Product Designer

Time Period

Jun 2019 - Jul 2021

4.5 minute read

The First Glucose Monitoring System For Athletes

Supersapiens was the world's first glucose monitoring system designed for non-diabetic athletes, built on Abbott's continuous glucose sensor technology and distributed exclusively through a partnership with Abbott Laboratories. I named the company, built the brand from zero, and designed the end-to-end app experience, taking Supersapiens from concept to a globally distributed product. The result: 40,000 users, a 4.5 App Store rating, 6 hardware integrations including Garmin and Apple Health, and $13.5M in venture funding supported by the brand and product design strategy we created. The technology went on to be used by elite athletes including Eliud Kipchoge and Ronan McLaughlin in world record-setting performances.

The Challenge

Pioneer the use of blood glucose as a core sport nutrition datum.

Company Context

Supersapiens is the first company to commercialize a glucose monitor specifically meant for athletes.

The First Glucose Monitoring System For Athletes

Supersapiens was the world's first glucose monitoring system designed for non-diabetic athletes, built on Abbott's continuous glucose sensor technology and distributed exclusively through a partnership with Abbott Laboratories. I named the company, built the brand from zero, and designed the end-to-end app experience, taking Supersapiens from concept to a globally distributed product. The result: 40,000 users, a 4.5 App Store rating, 6 hardware integrations including Garmin and Apple Health, and $13.5M in venture funding supported by the brand and product design strategy we created. The technology went on to be used by elite athletes including Eliud Kipchoge and Ronan McLaughlin in world record-setting performances.

The Challenge

Pioneer the use of blood glucose as a core sport nutrition datum.

Company Context

Supersapiens is the first company to commercialize a glucose monitor specifically meant for athletes.

My Role

Product Designer

Time Period

Jun 2019 - Jul 2021

4.5 minute read

The First Glucose Monitoring System For Athletes

Supersapiens was the world's first glucose monitoring system designed for non-diabetic athletes, built on Abbott's continuous glucose sensor technology and distributed exclusively through a partnership with Abbott Laboratories. I named the company, built the brand from zero, and designed the end-to-end app experience, taking Supersapiens from concept to a globally distributed product. The result: 40,000 users, a 4.5 App Store rating, 6 hardware integrations including Garmin and Apple Health, and $13.5M in venture funding supported by the brand and product design strategy we created. The technology went on to be used by elite athletes including Eliud Kipchoge and Ronan McLaughlin in world record-setting performances.

Goals

1

Create An App Useful To Athletes

Phil, the founder, is an athlete with diabetes. He understood the impact of glucose on his performance and wanted to spread this knowledge.

2

Make An Outstanding Brand

The company believed it was sitting on the next big thing in sport science. It wanted to anchor itself as a legitimate player in the industry.

3

Communicate The Value Of Glucose Tracking

Pioneering a new market is great but it comes with challenges, such as convincing people of the value of your technology.

Goals

1

Create An App Useful To Athletes

Phil, the founder, is an athlete with diabetes. He understood the impact of glucose on his performance and wanted to spread this knowledge.

2

Make An Outstanding Brand

The company believed it was sitting on the next big thing in sport science. It wanted to anchor itself as a legitimate player in the industry.

3

Communicate The Value Of Glucose Tracking

Pioneering a new market is great but it comes with challenges, such as convincing people of the value of your technology.

Goals

1

Create An App Useful To Athletes

Phil, the founder, is an athlete with diabetes. He understood the impact of glucose on his performance and wanted to spread this knowledge.

2

Make An Outstanding Brand

The company believed it was sitting on the next big thing in sport science. It wanted to anchor itself as a legitimate player in the industry.

3

Communicate The Value Of Glucose Tracking

Pioneering a new market is great but it comes with challenges, such as convincing people of the value of your technology.

1. Create An App Useful To Athletes

Scope And Constraints

Unlike individuals managing diabetes, athletes use glucose data in a performance context.

The challenge was to structure the app in a way that supports their workflows; we identified 3:

  • Initial learning: understanding glucose data

  • Preparing: training, developing fueling strategies for race day and recovering

  • Performing: staying well fueled throughout an event

My Contributions

App UI/UX

Tools: Sketch

App animations

Tools: Flinto, Cinema 4D

Learning

Learning

Food and behavior overlays on the graph, visualized correlation with glucose levels.

Plus a visual indicator system allowed to easily understand whether a user is within / under / above their target glucose range.

The "Learn" hub guided users through how to interpret their data and also provided experiments for the users to try and learn by doing.

Preparing

Preparing

Workouts could be analyzed through the lens of glucose levels and compared with previous workouts to A/B test different fueling strategies

Stats like overall daily glucose intake and avg glucose served to monitor and optimize food intake before races.

Performing

Performing

The Supersapiens app could integrate with Garmin devices and additionally Supersapiens made a custom sport watch to directly pair with the glucose sensor to avoid having to have a phone on your person. We designed all of the screens for the watch and created a custom font to optimize space on the small screen.

2. Make An Outstanding Brand

Scope And Constraints

We had carte blanche on the brand. The product sold would be a glucose monitoring system for athletes, however we wanted to avoid cornering them by using a name that would be too specific. In addition, we understood that consumer education would be a major hurdle, so we wanted to create a brand that felt aspirational and polished to maximize the company's credibility and stickiness.

My Contributions

Naming

Color Logic And Palette

Brand Visuals For Marketing

Packaging Design

Creative Direction

Tools: Sketch, Adobe Suite

Brand Colors

The brand philosophy centered around the idea of "finding your zone" as an athlete, so we decided to remove distractions, using only a muted black and white palette for brand graphics found on hardware and clothing and use color only when communicating meaning.

Brand Colors

The brand philosophy centered around the idea of "finding your zone" as an athlete, so we decided to remove distractions, using only a muted black and white palette for brand graphics found on hardware and clothing and use color only when communicating meaning.

Color Coding

Abbott, the company licensing the sensor hardware, did not permit us to use the traditional red, green, yellow system used in medical CGM devices. But beyond the restriction, we had a more fundamental reason to depart from convention: in a sports context, the high, in range, low colors do not map in the same way.


In endurance sport, elevated blood glucose during exercise is normal and expected. During high intensity effort, glycogen releases into the bloodstream to fuel muscles, pushing glucose above 120mg/dL. The same level during recovery, however, risks increasing inflammation.


So we reframed the colour logic around athletic meaning rather than medical convention. Salmon red became the Performance Zone (heat, blood, energy). Sky blue mapped to the recovery and stasis range (cool, calm, controlled). Indigo purple marked the true danger zone, low glucose below 79mg/dL.

Color Coding

Abbott, the company licensing the sensor hardware, did not permit us to use the traditional red, green, yellow system used in medical CGM devices. But beyond the restriction, we had a more fundamental reason to depart from convention: in a sports context, the high, in range, low colors do not map in the same way.


In endurance sport, elevated blood glucose during exercise is normal and expected. During high intensity effort, glycogen releases into the bloodstream to fuel muscles, pushing glucose above 120mg/dL. The same level during recovery, however, risks increasing inflammation.


So we reframed the colour logic around athletic meaning rather than medical convention. Salmon red became the Performance Zone (heat, blood, energy). Sky blue mapped to the recovery and stasis range (cool, calm, controlled). Indigo purple marked the true danger zone, low glucose below 79mg/dL.

A logo system as flexible as the athletes Supersapiens serves

Stretching
Tiling and patterns
Ouroboros style wrap around
Clothing

The brand rules for clothing dictated that the front of clothes could only feature the logomark to avoid distracting stimulus during training. The logotype would only appear on the back of clothes for the viewing pleasure of your opponents.

3. Communicate The Value Of Tracking Glucose

Scope And Constraints

One major challenge was convincing potential users of the value of glucose tracking for performance. With little established sport science around glucose and performance, Supersapiens had to build credibility and educate its audience in parallel with building the product.

One major challenge was convincing potential users of the value of glucose tracking for performance. With little established sport science around glucose and performance, Supersapiens had to build credibility and educate its audience in parallel with building the product.

My Contributions

UI/UX of the marketing website

Tools: Sketch

Design of social posts and print material

Tools: Sketch, Adobe Suite

Educating The Market

The website had to do two jobs simultaneously: explain what the system was (hardware, software, how they work together) and make the case for why glucose data matters to athletes who had never thought about it.

The use of infographics was crucial to quickly communicate how eating too little or too much food could negatively affect ones performance and recovery. Driving home the need for an informed sport-nutrition strategy.

Building credibility

Credibility came from the research of our science team but also from real athletes. We built a social and print graphic system combining athlete testimonials with data visualisations, making the science tangible through the experiences of real competitors.

Conclusion

Over two years we named a company, built a brand from scratch, and designed a pioneering app experience that introduced blood glucose as a performance metric to elite sport, reaching 40,000 athletes and finding its way onto the arms of world record-setters such as Eliud Kipchoge.

Credits for work shown here

Mert Erdir

Design

My co-founder at Temple Design, we worked in tandem on creative direction for the brand as well as ideating solutions and executing on the App designs.

Christian Haberkern

Motion Graphics

For producing motion graphics that were used in the app and for marketing. Including the Logomark animation seen in the Goal 2 intro section.

Todd Furneaux

COO

Being a fervent amateur athlete, Todd worked alongside Mert and I informing some of the core ways in which we interpreted and served Glucose data in the app.

Fitzalan Crowe & Travis McKenzie

Marketing

For a stellar job at getting the product in front of some of the world's greatest athletes and making it easy for our social media designs to shine

Federico Fontana & The Science Team

Science

For pioneering the science behind glucose and performance and helping us understand how to best communicate these concepts within the app.

Get In Touch

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Get In Touch

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Linkedin

Get In Touch

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Linkedin

DB