Recon Instruments
Mobile & Web Platform
Led the design of Recon’s first mobile and web applications – transforming raw goggle telemetry into a connected, gamified sports platform and migrating 85% of the desktop community to mobile within a single season.
The Final Result
A community of elite snow sports athletes transitioned from a tethered desktop app to a seamless mobile and web ecosystem.
The Challenge
Recon’s hardware was pioneering — live speed, GPS, and jump data in your goggles — but the experience ended when you left the mountain. Users could only access their data on desktop, and there was no social layer to share achievements or compete with friends. The gap between the in-goggle experience and the rest of a rider’s digital life was killing retention and limiting the brand’s growth.
- Desktop-only access cut users off post-run
- Raw telemetry data had no social or gamified context
- No mobile sync meant the post-run ritual was broken
- Glove-unfriendly interfaces made on-mountain use painful
My Role
Jul 2011 – Mar 2013
Senior UX/UI Designer across a 21-month engagement. I owned the design of the Recon Engage mobile and web platforms from the ground up – establishing the design system, leading e-commerce redesign for the 2012/2013 launch, and shaping the data vizualisation experience that turned raw telemetry into social fuel.
- Product vision & go-to-market strategy
- Design system (Figma)
- Payments onboarding flows
- KYC & address verification UX
- Checkout redesign
- Usability & conversion testing
Four pillars of the platform
The Recon Engage platform was built around four interconnected features – each one extending the in-goggle experience into the rider’s broader digital life and social world.
Typography & Color Scheme
Recon’s users operated in conditions that invalidated most standard UX conventions.
From data tracker to social platform
The platform launched in time for the 2012 winter season and achieved rapid community migration. Recon’s work on wearable display UX – much of which was pioneered in this platform – positioned the company as an early leader in augmented reality, leading to its acquisition by Intel in 2015.
- 85% of Recon HQ desktop users migrated to the new mobile platform by the 2012 winter season
- Foundational design system established for Recon Engage web and mobile – scalable across all platform surfaces
- E-commerce store redesign optimised checkout and user journey for the 2012/2013 seasonal sales launch
- Telemetry data transformed into social, gamified experiences – jump counts and top speeds became shareable achievements
- Virtual Remote solved the glove-usability problem that had limited on-mountain engagement with the goggle interface
- Recon acquired by Intel in 2015 – platform work positioned the brand as a leader in early AR/wearable tech
Want to see how it was built?
The process page covers the contextual field research, how telemetry data was designed for social consumption, the design system architecture, and the e-commerce redesign approach.
