By Dennis Barker

RUNNING IS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY, and so is developing software. A new iPhone app developed by a team at Brazilian software and services company Ci&T incorporates both those ideas.

Marcio Cyrillo, head of mobile for Ci&T and a dedicated runner, looked out his high-rise New York City window one very cold January day. He was in training for a marathon, but at the moment was not feeling the motivation. “To run here in winter is very painful,” says the Brazil native.

But outside, down below, he saw people who were not trapped inside by the weather. “I thought, If other people are running, then I should be out there. All I need is someone who can can give me tips on how not to freeze,” Cyrillo says. This grew into an idea for a social software tool that would help people find compatible running partners, which in turn could boost their motivation — “motivation to go out and run no matter the weather conditions.”

“We want to do that by creating ‘social debt’ between you and the people you know,” Cyrillo says. “If you are part of a running club and you make plans together with someone to run a certain race and commit to preparing for it, there’s nothing better than a tool to show who’s really committing and who’s sliding.”

There are lots of web sites that help runners meet up, but Cyrillo realized the “virtual window” he was looking for needed to be mobile, a smartphone app. It had to enable sharing info in real time, with people “who are out there running now,” and it also had to have a clean interface, letting users “run with easy access to relevant info.”

He spent a few months and much spare time doing preliminary designs and mockups, then showed the idea to a co-worker, who encouraged him to present it to company founder & CEO César Gon. (“But don’t present it as a line of business,” the co-worker said, “because our business is outsourcing.”)

The top man liked what he saw, and encouraged Cyrillo to proceed with the app that would become known as runens. The project would also come to represent within Ci&T a new approach to entrepreneurship, essentially letting runens spin off into its own venture.

Along with Cyrillo as product owner, the runens start-up team consisted of two iOS developers, a Java developer to handle the cloud services, and two interface designers. “My experience leading Ci&T’s creative team was fundamental to lead the UI building, but the team came up with most of the solutions,” Cyrillo says.

Ci&T had already done a lot of work with mobile platforms. One of its projects involved creating an iPad app for Coca-Cola (for whom it has also handled major web projects). The runens team’s biggest development challenge, Cyrillo says, “was to prioritize features so that we built something that could set us aside from existent solutions without burning a lot of money.”

The runens group leveraged Ci&T’s agile development skills and lean programming techniques. “We also did the design of the app using agile methodology, which is still quite uncommon,” Cyrillo says. “I have been preaching that design and development should be done together as opposed to the waterfall model [which basically says completely finish design before starting development]. There’s a movement now called lean UX… We used that approach without really knowing about it; it was intuitive for us.”

Lean UX (user experience) implements agile development practices and heavily emphasizes iterative testing, learning from user feedback, and tweaking accordingly. The general idea is to come up with a lot of design options, see how users react, and then quickly figure out which ones to adopt. It “reduces the wasted effort and cost of spending time on issues that don’t really matter (or don’t matter right now),” says Tim McCoy of Cooper, a design studio in San Francisco, in a good piece on “product stewardship.”

That all ties in to one of the lessons Cyrillo says really hit home for the team while working on the new app.

“Sometimes a flawlessly developed feature isn’t effective,” he says. “We need to understand how the users will behave when facing it. Also, the most important thing I personally learned was that when building an app for a gadget, you must think about the gadget as a unique device and design the app for it. We believe we did this with runens.”

Social Development

Applying agile methods requires what you might call a more social form of software development. There’s much more social engagement and human interaction than under traditional methods. People who conceive products and the people who then build those products have to interact much more than under traditional methods like the waterfall system, and ideally product users are included in the mix too. The art of making software by necessity becomes what running is for many people: social.

Getting more people using the app is the challenge now. The trick is to convey what’s different about runens compared to dozens of other activity-tracking tools out there, including one carrying the Nike brand.

“We have been talking to running clubs, including the New York Road Runners,” Cyrillo says. Clubs would be a natural user base; members could use runens to share times and goals and schedules, as well as coordinate activities. “You have 15 people who all meet at Columbus Circle to run 5 miles through the park. They want to get together afterwards. They run at different speeds. But with runens, they can see the dots indicating where the other runners are in the park. That’s a tool a runner’s club could use.”

The app did get a promotional boost recently at the “New York Tech Start-Up Classic,” where it was showcased as one of the three “most creative digital innovations.”

For now, runens is in the market, and Cyrillo says they plan to get feedback from users, see how running clubs react to possible new features, and then adapt the product accordingly — a very lean and agile approach.

 

> You can listen to Marcio discuss “agile creative design” here.

 

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