Climbey App

A log for two different sports

Climbey is a mobile app for people who climb indoors and want a record of what they climbed. It covers bouldering and rope climbing together, because most people in a gym do both and want one history rather than two.

What a climbing session leaves to record

A running app has distance and time to work with. A climbing session has neither. What a climber wants back is the grade, the style of the wall and whether the route went first try, and the grade depends on which of the two disciplines they were on, since bouldering and rope climbing are scored on separate scales. A log that flattens both into one number loses the thing being tracked, so the entry form had to know which sport it was recording before it asked anything else.

Desk research, and what it could not reach

This was desk research rather than a study. I went through the climbing apps and the general fitness trackers that already existed and looked at where climbers were working around them. The pattern was that precision and speed pull against each other: the grade, the wall style and the send status all have to be exact, and they get entered in the half minute between attempts, standing under the wall with chalk on your hands. Nobody fills in a long form there.

The page should also say what I did not do. There were no interviews and no usability sessions with climbers. Everything below is reasoned from other products and from the brief, which is thinner evidence than sitting with five climbers would have been.

Entering a route in the time between attempts

Registration is short and there is a guest route through it, so someone who installs the app at the gym can log a climb before deciding whether to make an account. The log itself is a calendar: pick the date, add the route, and each entry carries the grade, the wall style and the send status, Flash or No Flash. Entries stay editable afterwards, because the realistic moment for correcting a grade is on the way home rather than under the wall.

Gyms sit behind two tabs, My Gyms and Find Gyms, each with search and a rating. Adding a gym goes through Google Maps, which brings the facility details in with it instead of asking the climber to type them. The profile screen is the ordinary one, with a password change on it.

The wall gets stripped every few weeks

The part of this I had not seen in another app is builder tracking. A builder is the person who sets the routes, and in an indoor gym the routes are temporary: a wall is stripped and reset on a cycle of weeks, so "the blue one on the slab" stops meaning anything shortly after it is climbed. Recording the setter next to the grade and the style tags, slab, vertical, overhang and roof, gives a climber something that survives the reset, because setters have recognisable habits and a grade from one of them is not the same climb as the same grade from another. It is also the feature that most needed testing, and got none.

The interface is green, taken from the outdoor side of the sport rather than from the gym, and deliberately plain. The screens carry a lot of small numbers and the colour is not competing with them. It was drawn in Figma, and the logo in Illustrator.

What the project does not have

Climbey is a finished design set and the logo is mine as well. What it never had is a round of testing. The flows have not been in front of a climber, so wherever the grade entry is too slow, or the builder tracking is more than anyone actually wants, I do not know about it yet.