Case study
Cuyar — movement for adults over 65
Most fitness apps are built for people who already exercise. Cuyar is built for people who have been told by a doctor that they should start moving, and who have never used an app to do it.
That single difference decided almost every technical choice in the product.
The constraints that shaped it
The audience is 65 and older. Tap targets, contrast, and type size are not polish items here, they are the product. So is the tone: the app never scolds, never counts calories, and never implies that a hard day is a failure.
They are often offline. Cuyar's users are in basements, community centres, and apartments with bad signal. An app that needs a connection to show today's movement is an app that fails at the moment it is needed. So the whole thing works offline — including audio.
They are bilingual, or Spanish-dominant. Not an afterthought toggle. English and Spanish ship in one build, and the Spanish was written in Spanish rather than translated.
Voice matters more than text. Reading instructions while trying to balance is a bad experience. The coaching had to be audio.
What we built
29 illustrated movements with original artwork, organised on a seated → supported → standing axis so that the same session adapts to whatever a person can safely do today.
Nine coach voices, recorded rather than synthesised. We evaluated browser text-to-speech and rejected it: the cadence is wrong for instruction, it degrades unpredictably across devices, and it cannot be relied on offline. Clip-backed audio ships with the app instead.
An installable progressive web app. No app store, no 200MB download, no update that requires a review cycle. It installs to the home screen and works without a connection.
A movement guide, a privacy policy and terms published in both languages, and an accessibility pass driven by the audience rather than by a checklist.
The decision we're proudest of
We researched adding a visible difficulty level and progression rank — the standard engagement mechanic — and then deliberately did not ship it.
The reasoning: a visible rank makes "this felt hard today" an expensive thing to admit. For a 65+ audience, that self-report is the single most important safety signal the app receives. Any mechanic that discourages honesty about difficulty is actively dangerous, no matter what it does for retention.
Adaptive difficulty stayed. The scoreboard didn't. That is the kind of trade a studio only makes when it understands who it is building for.
What this demonstrates
Designing to a hard accessibility constraint rather than retrofitting to one; bilingual product craft including recorded voice in two languages; offline-first PWA architecture; and the judgement to leave out an engagement feature that would have hurt the user.
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