Fitbit – Challenge Event Websites

Fitbit UK relies on KLOC to develop an integrated challenge management and dashboard platform, covering events such as Sport Relief 2016, Parkrun and Royal Parks Half-Marathons.

Background

Fitbit are the leading global wearables brand, providing technology to help people live healthier lives. One of the ways that they are achieving this in the UK is by supporting events such as Sport Relief and the Royal Parks Half Marathons with participation challenges for users of activity trackers.

Aspiration

The challenges that Fitbit create and support are designed to drive broad awareness of the brand and encourage community participation by making daily activity fun. Using their activity trackers to capture users data, activity such as total steps and distance is captured, aggregated and distributed via event-specific media.

Participants are motivated by event goals, charity donations and prizes, and the regular information updates provided by bespoke websites, social media channels and mailings help people to stay engaged through out the challenge. At the end of each event, success is measured and results delivered to the participants and wider marketplace in order to promote the event itself and Fitbit’s involvement.

Action

Fitbit selected KLOC Digital Solutions as its UK development partner to deliver its challenge platforms for Sport Relief 2016, Parkrun, Fitbit 50 and Royal Parks half Marathon Challenge.

In each case the objective was to provide web-based platforms that would facilitate participant registration & authentication, link to Fitbit’s core infrastructure via its public API and provide near real-time and historical activity updates to the general public and participants.

In all cases timescales were tight and scalability requirements were known only to be extreme! In the case of FitBit’s Big Billion Step-a-thon for Sport Relief the requirement was to serve over 5 million page views at launch and process n00,000 participant registrations before gathering step data for 5 billion steps that counted towards the overall objective.

Results

Due to the unpredictable nature of the traffic volume, KLOC elected to build a suite of hardware and software infrastructure that was designed with unlimited ability to scale-out.

Breaking each deliverable element down into self-contained sub-systems and ensuring that work could be divided up into multiple streams ensured that hardware could be added as required and any traffic scenario could be dealt with efficiently.

KLOC then combined bespoke code with the Fitbit API to produce a front-end web CMS and back-end step counting and data analysis platform to provide the facilities and information required by the participants and event administrators.

Due to the approach taken, KLOC successfully delivered and ran each of the Fitbit challenges with 100% success.