Profile by Sanford Health
Challenge
Providing full-time development resources for a national weight loss program’s mobile innovation Profile by Sanford is a personalized nutrition, activity, and lifestyle coaching program designed to help members lose weight - and keep it off - by teaming them up with their own health coach who has the skills that best match their needs. Profile was working with mobile apps built using Xamarin, a cross-platform tool where code is written once then deployed to both iOS and Android, for nearly 7 years. The apps regularly didn’t function as Profile and its membership base wanted them to and averaged well under 3-star reviews on the App Store and Google Play Store. To create a better mobile experience for their members, Profile needed full-time development resources to redesign the apps natively for iOS and Android. “We did a poor job of maintaining the apps and keeping them current," said Eric Aasheim, Chief Technology Officer of Profile by Sanford Health. "It was bad, and we knew it. We let them sit long enough that it wasn’t worth fixing, and we knew we had to start from scratch with a clean slate for our membership base.” Eric is a developer by trade and responsible for the technology stack and development projects at Profile by Sanford. Without a technical team on staff fluent in custom mobile app development, Eric decided early on to augment his team, knowing that a dedicated, outsourced team with proven mobile app expertise was critical to the project’s success. Eric felt the Sioux Falls community where Profile is based didn’t have a lot of strong mobile resources dedicated to native app development, so he scoured the internet for mobile app agencies in the upper Midwest. After speaking with several development agencies in the Twin Cities, Profile partnered with JMG to augment their technical team and develop custom iOS and Android apps for its members. Eric landed on JMG based on the knowledge conveyed, overall friendliness, and ability to ease into their team.
Solution
Acting as a remote part of Profile’s team, we developed a custom mobile app called Journey for both iOS and Android. The Journey App provides members the convenience of their personalized healthy weight loss plan when and where they need it. Giving them the power to schedule coaching appointments, set reminders, track progress and more, it helps take the stress and overthinking out of weight loss. We consulted on niche features specific to developing mobile apps, providing guidance on areas such as push notifications, deployment to each app store, and distributing builds to testers. When new firmware using Bluetooth Low Energy commands struggled to connect members’ scales to their correct WiFi signal, we wrote code which allowed the scale to communicate directly with the app via Bluetooth without members needing to enter their WiFi credentials.
Results
Profile’s metrics for measuring success were user ratings above 4 stars in both the App Store and Google Play Store, combined with positive feedback from its membership base.
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