Specialized

Specialized launched a new sensor that tracks a rider’s power and cadence. To make it usable, they needed a mobile app that let two very different groups set the device up: everyday customers at home, and the Independent Bike Dealers (IBDs) who sell and service their bikes.

It’s hardware-adjacent product design, the kind where the app is the difference between a sensor that feels effortless and one that gets returned.

Hardware setup is where good products quietly lose people. The job was to make pairing and configuring the sensor feel simple for a rider doing it once at home, and efficient for a dealer doing it many times a day.

That meant deciding early where the rider and dealer paths should diverge, and where they could safely share the same screens.

We moved quickly. I worked from user flows into wireframes and straight into design, keeping the path tight so the development teams could start building against something real as soon as possible.

The output was two InVision prototypes, one for iOS and one for Android, handed off to their respective development teams, with the rider and dealer setup paths defined before a line of production code.

The prototypes gave the iOS and Android teams an unambiguous, interactive spec to build from, the rider and dealer experiences resolved up front, so engineering could focus on bringing the sensor to life rather than untangling the flow.

When there’s hardware on the other end, the setup experience is the product. Speed mattered here, and going flows-to-wireframes-to-prototype kept us honest and fast without skipping the thinking.

Designing for two audiences in one app is mostly about divergence: decide deliberately where the rider and the dealer need different things, and let them share everything else.