Behind the Design: Slopes
August 15, 2022
It is a demonstrable fact of app development that most great ideas arrive in late-night diners.
At least, that’s how it went for Curtis Herbert — creator and mastermind behind the ski-tracking app Slopes. One evening during a winter trip to the Poconos, Herbert and some friends hit up a Denny’s for a late-night feast, where talk quickly turned to the day’s activities: Who was the fastest on the mountain? Who had the longest run? How many vertical feet did they ski?
In response to one of the questions, Herbert pulled out the skiing app he’d been using to track stats — and found the UX equivalent of a yard sale. The stats were there, but buried amidst graphs and maps; to find enough data to compare (and brag about, probably), Herbert had to cross-reference three screens and a table view.
“It was really well-engineered, but the UX left a lot to be desired,” says Herbert from his elevation-appropriate home in Boulder, Colorado. “They clearly had skiers on the team, but it felt like something got lost in translation… I thought, ‘You know, I can do better than this.’”
Curtis Herbert, taking Slopes out on the slopes.
Herbert made good on his thought — and ten years of ski runs and late-night meals later, Slopes won an 2022 Apple Design Award for its remarkably accurate and comprehensive digital diary of your skiing day. The tracking app is a veritable mountain of data for skiers and snowboarders. It includes all the stats Herbert was seeking out over dinner: speeds, miles, and vertical drops, as well as the locations of your friends and family members on the mountain during runs. It’s all done automatically using GPS on iPhone and Apple Watch, and it’s presented in a crisp, concise design.
“Runners have Runkeeper, Nike Training Club, and Strava for keeping stats, but when I started, there just wasn’t much for skiers,” says Herbert. “There was even less that felt part of the skiing community. I needed an app written by a skiier or snowboarder. And I wanted it to feel as human as possible.”
To use Slopes, just press record — the app takes care of the rest.
Slopes is a set-it-and-forget-it app: Recordings can be started on iPhone or Apple Watch, which is more accessible on a lift or in a line. “A lot of interaction design is thinking holistically about the ski experience,” he says. “To me, having a great experience means: Does the thing on screen react the way I’d expect it to? Can I physically interact with this digital concept? Does it feel real?”
Still, a skiing app presents a novel set of challenges, both technical (How do you ensure the GPS is accurately reporting your true location and speed?) and practical (How do you tap a screen while wearing puffy gloves in sub-zero temperatures on a flying bench?). Herbert’s solution is an app that works seamlessly across Apple Watch and iPhone.
“The design of Slopes is very much informed by the situation,” he says. “On a ski lift, you’re 100 feet up. You don’t necessarily want to pull your phone out and fumble with it. So for me, there has to be a lot of thought about: What are the main interactions that really need to happen, and what device is the best to do that with?”
Slopes shows where your friends are on the mountain.
Herbert says Slopes on Apple Watch makes the most crucial data accessible on the wrist. “We think of Slopes as a unified recording experience that’s with you throughout the day,” he says. “If you want to see how much vertical drop you’ve had for the day, glance at your wrist. If you have gloves on and can’t get to your watch, all your stats show up on iPhone. The idea is you don’t have to think about how to use it; however you want to get your data, it’s there.”
Another Apple Watch benefit: Through HealthKit integration, Slopes can track and report sometimes surprising fitness metrics. The watchOS app also includes a helpful “auto-lock” setting that prevents the screen from being accidentally activate by a glove bump or bit of moisture.
But for all its technical magic, the human factor is part of what helps elevate Slopes beyond simple stat tracking. Rather, the app affords skiers of all levels — from beginners on their inaugural bunny slopes to the human rockets on double black diamonds — a way to quantitatively gauge themselves via rich performance metrics. Or, to put it simply: It tells you how much better you’re getting.
“It’s really easy to overwhelm with stats,” says Herbert, who’s known as “The Slopes Guy” on the mountain. (Meeting him in real life is an in-app achievement that scores you a special pin.) “You really have to pick what matters to tell the story. I designed Slopes to be as human as possible because I view it as a journal for your memories. Sure, you’re gonna faceplant a few times. But when you get to your first intermediate run, and then to your first advanced run, you become the hero of your own story.”
Slopes shows you where you’ve been on the mountain — and how fast you got there.
‘I get to cheat’
Creating designs for your hobby can be a huge time-saver.
“I get to a cheat a little because I’m the snowboarder, designer, developer, and product manager,” Herbert says. “Snowboarders or skiers might not necessarily know what’s possible from a technical perspective, and engineers might just try to go the default way.”
It’s helped that Herbert’s evolution as a snowboarder has mirrored the app’s growth. “I’m fortunate in that I only started snowboarding 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s a recent enough memory that I can put myself in the shoes of beginners. I mean, you’re going downhill at 30 or 40 miles per hour — and that’s intimidating! And I can remember, ‘OK, this is where people just getting into the sport might struggle,’ or ‘Here’s a thing that made me feel really good.’”
Beyond Slopes’s people-friendly interface and powerful stat-tracking, Herbert is particularly proud of the app’s 3D mapping support for resorts and runs. “Skiers and snowbarders think in 3D,” he says. “Going into this, one of my big ideas was the ability to look back at my runs and see the 3D profile. I don’t want to have to assemble the puzzle. I want to see, ‘Oh, here’s where I went really fast,’ or, ‘Here was that really steep turn.’”
On a lift, you’re 100 feet up. You don’t necessarily want to pull your phone out and fumble with it.
Curtis Herbert, Slopes creator
The skiing apps he’d used prior to creating Slopes only offered top-down or side-profile views, which was workable — but ultimately lacking. In part, there simply weren’t great data sets for resorts, runs, and lifts.
So Herbert turned to GPS data to help. He’d already planned to offer the full Slopes experience even if someone only had GPS enabled, as cellular connectivity could be dicey in the backcountry. “We had to figure out how to pull that data and translate in 3D,” he says. With no 3D experience to speak of, Herbert taught himself SceneKit to create the feature.
The Slopes team gathers for a company retreat in Whistler.
Today, Herbert and the growing Slopes team are expanding their mapping offerings to help people better locate friends and family during a ski trip. “There can be a lot of intimidation about going somewhere for the first time,” he says. “You might look at a map and say, ‘Am I gonna be able to get back here? Am I gonna end up going off a cliff on a double-diamond?’ I think this’ll take the edge off for a lot of people.”
In recent years, Herbert and the team have focused more on those collaborative features to bring people together. “I hear from a lot of families who’ve used it to get their sons or daughters into skiing. We’ve even heard from people who’ve used the location features to find phones they’ve lost on the mountain.”(Speaking of locations, Herbert makes his public when skiing; you can find him to say hi and get that pin. “It makes for good stories,” he says with a grin.)
But it turns out that goes for his own family too. “My niece recently learned to ski at Killington, so I said, ‘Here, put this phone in your pocket.’ And she lit up at the end of the day, like ‘Look how far I went!’ It’s hard to get that perspective until you see it with numbers on a map, especially if you did much more than you thought. Hearing that it brings people together at the end of the day, sitting around the fire comparing stats, making a sport that I love more enjoyable to people — that’s the best stuff.”
Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.