Fideful
Turns wearable data into challenges and leaderboards friends actually want to see.
Jonathan
Founder, Fideful
Fideful is a social fitness app that turns wearable data into crew leaderboards, friend challenges, and a friend-powered activity feed. I came on as UX/UI designer and extended the brand into the physical and digital spaces the original team hadn't covered.
Fideful is a social fitness and wellness app built around wearable data. Apple Watch, Oura, Whoop, and more feed into it through Rook, and I designed the layer that turns that raw telemetry into something people actually want to look at: crew leaderboards, friend challenges, and a system-generated activity feed modeled after apps like Duolingo instead of a raw stats dump.
I worked end to end across onboarding, the dashboard, the challenges system, crews (the app's term for friend groups), and the social feed. All of it built around one rule the founding team was firm on from day one: your own numbers are your own numbers, but anything shown about someone else gets translated into plain language first. So you see your real sleep score. Your friend just sees whether they had a tough week, a stable one, or a good one. That's what keeps a crew leaderboard feeling like a nudge instead of a comparison.
Challenge
Turn wearable data into something social without making it feel like a leaderboard for your health.
Fitness apps that gamify wearable data tend to backfire. Put someone's raw HRV or sleep score next to a friend's and you don't get motivation, you get anxiety, or someone gaming their own numbers to win a leaderboard. The founding team knew this going in. The whole reason crews and challenges work in Fideful is connection, people checking in on each other, not a scoreboard built out of sensitive health data. I needed a system that could feel encouraging and social while keeping actual health numbers out of direct, side-by-side comparison.
Solution
Designed the challenges system, crew leaderboards, dashboard, and activity feed, including a privacy-first model for what friends can see about each other.
I built a three-part scoring model, movement, sleep, and readiness, that feeds the crew rankings, the challenges system, and the dashboard's key insights. Then I built a hard rule around it: a user's own data shows real numbers, but anything shown about someone else gets translated first into a color and a plain-language status instead of a raw score. That's what shows up on a friend's card: tough week, stable, or above average, plus a direct way to check in on them. Challenges only pull from connected wearables, Apple Watch, Oura, Whoop, whatever's linked. No manual logging, because the moment you let people self-report a workout, you've built a system people can lie to.
Result
Still building. Fideful is heading into its MVP build with the design locked around crews, challenges, and a privacy model the whole team is bought into.
Fideful hasn't shipped yet. The team is mid-MVP build, moving from design into development, with weekly reviews to keep product and engineering aligned before launch. The two numbers below are what we'll actually be tracking once it's live.
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