The Idea

Bruce Smith, CEO & Founder of CREW, has an impressive background in rowing—executive director of Community Rowing in Boston, coaching the US team in the World Rowing Championships, and a victory at the Head of the Charles. Rowing has been central to both his personal and professional life.

“I’ve always believed that rowing is underutilized—not just in fitness, but as a way to foster empathy and connection. Instead of building boathouses, we wanted to bring the rowing experience to a broader audience through technology.”

Originally, Bruce and his team planned to develop an app that would work with existing rowing machines. However, after receiving overwhelming positive feedback from investors, they quickly pivoted to building both the app and a new hardware device—the Hydrow Rower. The rower itself is a masterpiece of design and engineering, but it’s the app that delivers the immersive experience. Hydrow’s vision was to broadcast live from the water, offering a "Live Outdoor Reality" that would make users feel like they were truly rowing in nature. The goal was to capture and translate the emotional and physical experience of outdoor rowing into a digital format.

Our Strategic Approach

The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.

While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.

Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.

Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.

Design

The Experience

UI Design

When Hydrow approached Rocket Farm Studios, they had a basic vision for the app, but Rocket Farm helped elevate that idea into something exceptional. “We knew the general direction, but Dan and his team refined our vision and gamified the experience, making it truly engaging.”

One of the key challenges was translating the analog rowing experience into the digital world. To achieve this, the team adopted an agile approach, iterating rapidly to test and refine features. This allowed them to deliver a working app in record time.

The app not only live streams from coaches on the water but also allows users to connect with friends globally, row as a team, track personal metrics, and view leaderboards. The design also had to account for usability during intense workouts, ensuring that the UI was intuitive and easy to navigate.

“One standout feature is the Netflix-style interface for selecting workouts. Our ‘quick free’ design philosophy meant the UI needed to be simple and barrier-free, allowing users to get started with no friction. Rocket Farm was exceptional in maintaining this simplicity, pushing back on any complexity introduced during development.”

The result was a visually stunning, user-friendly experience that revolutionized virtual rowing.

Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Development

Making it work

Rocket Farm partnered with Hydrow to build an app that recreates the feel of rowing on open water. No product on the market could provide this kind of immersive experience, so the team had to innovate every step of the way.

The development team focused on ensuring the app could handle live streaming, user interaction, and real-time metrics, all while maintaining an intuitive design. With the integration of features like touch screen controls, personal performance tracking, and seamless connections with the Hydrow hardware, the app pushed the boundaries of what a fitness app could achieve.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used