BurnCalAI

Inside the BurnCal AI project.

The brief

BurnCal AI is an AI-powered fitness and nutrition platform that uses camera-vision and AI to estimate workout intensity, calorie burn and form quality. The team had a working prototype and a clear product vision but needed a UX partner to turn that prototype into a daily-use consumer app that retained users beyond the first week. Makreate was brought in to lead UX research, design and prototyping for the iOS and Android product.

Discovery

We spent the first phase understanding the actual user before touching the design. We watched 12 target users go through their existing workout routines — what they tracked, what they didn't, what they wished an app did, and where they abandoned existing fitness apps. The single biggest insight was that the apps that fail in this category fail because they ask the user to do too much before the user feels any benefit. The first session has to feel valuable in 60 seconds or the user is gone.

Strategy

We designed BurnCal around a 'first-session value' principle: the app delivers a measurable, motivating outcome inside the first minute of use. The camera-vision AI was foregrounded as the differentiator — letting users point their phone at a workout and immediately get a calorie/effort estimate, no manual setup required. Onboarding was stripped to two questions. Logging was made one-tap. Long-term engagement features (challenges, streaks, communities) were layered in after the user had already seen the core value.

Execution

Full UX research and design: 30+ user interviews and usability tests, a complete information architecture, wireframes for 40+ screens across iOS and Android, a clickable Figma prototype tested with target users in three rounds, and a design system the engineering team could implement directly. We also collaborated on the AI's UX — making the camera-vision feel reliable, transparent and trustworthy (huge for adoption).

Outcome

The most important outcome wasn't a launch metric — it was the team's confidence that the product had a real chance in a brutally crowded category. The prototype tested well across both iOS-native and Android-native users. The handover to engineering was clean enough that the build phase didn't require us to be in every standup.

"I was really impressed with the work that MAKREATE did for us. They were able to take our complex ideas and translate them into a user-friendly and visually appealing design. The new product helped us increase conversions and retention, and we received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. I would definitely recommend MAKREATE to anyone looking for a top-notch UX design firm." Chetan — CEO, BurnCal — USA

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