Arcel
Helping hybrid athletes train with a coach grounded in 300+ sports-science papers.
Timeline
April 2026 – Present
Team
2 Engineers, 1 Designer
Role
UI/UX Design & Product
Skills
AI interaction design, Mobile UX, Information architecture, Prototyping
What is Arcel?
Arcel is a training app for hybrid athletes. It builds a plan around strength, conditioning and a sport, and answers training questions using 300+ sports-science papers.
The session for the day
Arcel project requirement
Working with two engineers, I was asked to turn Arcel from a research assistant into a training coach. This included a feature audit, a PRD, a new information architecture and a clickable prototype.
01
Context
Hybrid athletes balance strength, conditioning and a sport, so a plan has to work around games and practices.
02
Why it matters
Richard Xu and Dimitrios Mahairas had built retrieval over 300+ papers. It needed to feel like one coach, not five tools.
03
Launch
Arcel is launching soon on the App Store.
The problem
Arcel began as a research assistant with a planner attached. Answers backed by real papers lived on their own page, so athletes had to move between tools to decide what to do each day.
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The early research assistant version of Arcel
How might we make sports-science research feel like a coach, not a library?
Users and stakeholders
In this step, I looked at who Arcel is for and what they need from it.
01
Know today’s session
One workout, fully prescribed.
02
Plan around games
Practices and matches shape the week.
03
Trust the advice
Every answer can show its source.
Design process
I worked through questions like - When should the coach speak up? Who makes changes to the plan? How do people check the advice? The answers became three rules.
01
Summoned, never ambient
Screens stay calm until you ask.
02
Proposals, not silent edits
Changes arrive as cards you apply or dismiss.
03
Evidence on demand
Any answer opens to the paper behind it.
Key decision
The biggest change came in October, when we moved chat from its own tab to a button on every screen, and Plans took its place.
Chat as a tab
Chat as a button on every screen
Features
Onboarding answers, workouts and sports sessions are turned into a three-week plan that refreshes weekly.
Plan the week
The user adds practices and games, and the plan works around them.
Ask the coach
The user asks a question from any screen and can open the paper behind the answer.
Track progress
The user sees twelve weeks of consistency and strength milestones.
Screens from the current app with sample training data. The chat answer is illustrative; the cited paper is real.
Summary
Arcel went from a research assistant with a planner attached to a training coach built around each athlete’s week. I redesigned the information architecture and visual system, and the team built it into a working mobile app.
What’s next
We are still working on Arcel. Right now we are improving how plans are generated and how research is found and cited, and getting the app ready for the App Store.
Next up