The result of a year-long Interaction Design course gave me a lesson in human nature and what we all really long for
The task: build the prototype of an app for which there is a user need. No problem! But, wait…
This task was part of an Interaction Design course I’ve been taking for a year now, and the journey to prototype has been just as interesting (or moreso!) than the finished product itself. For starters, we weren’t told what to design — but there had to be a need for it and *that* we had to figure out ourselves. We were given several broad design inspirations to point us along and the one that I chose was “Change.” What kind of app could help people produce a desired change?
I began with needfinding — trying to figure out what was a problem that needed a solution. I began looking around me and one of the areas I quickly zeroed in on was health and exercise. Almost everywhere I looked, people were concerned with health and exercise. Some of these people were doing something about it, other people were just worrying about it and not taking action. There are plenty of products out there that help people who already know what they’re doing exercise-wise, so I decided to concentrate on that second group: people who knew they needed to do more to protect their health but were overwhelmed at the prospect and didn’t know where to began.
Community: Where it’s at.
Change can be tough. And when I began interviewing people who were struggling to incorporate exercise into their lives, it became very clear that change was all about emotion and not about reason and facts. The people I interviewed knew they needed to exercise because their quality of life was suffering from the lack of it. But to some extent, they all felt scared and lonely. They were surrounded by people who didn’t have it as bad as they did, and the point of comparison couldn’t help but be discouraging. The seed was planted: what if there was a way to connect people who were in the same situation so that they didn’t feel so lonely and could see that other people just like them were fighting and succeeding in the same struggle?
A plan formed: create an app that would let people set simple exercise goals and track their progress. The app world is awash with products that help you track and optimize your exercise performance, so this part of the app would be nothing revolutionary. Where this product would differ is that it would take into account the emotions that its users were struggling with and it would provide them with a forum where they could both vent and receive support. When registering with the app a new user would pick a group that matched the situation they were in (for example, needing to lose 50+ pounds or struggling with chronic pain).Then, each time they logged exercise they could go directly to their group’s forum and see what other people were struggling with. The idea is that if you see someone who is overcoming their challenges, it’s an inspiration for you to push through. If you see someone who is struggling with motivation or pain and talking about it, it helps you to know that you’re not the only one struggling with these issues.
From idea to prototype
Starting with paper prototypes, I began building the app, which I named “FitTogether.” Some of my early ideas proved to be too ambitious (a world map showing where all the app’s users were), and quickly I narrowed the features down to the ones that were most relevant to the design problem and I focused my efforts there. Once I had an interactive prototype in hand, I took the app back to some of the people I’d interviewed in the needfinding stage and asked them to use it. Here again I learned that simpler was better and areas where I tried to get fancy ended up confusing the users rather than inspiring them.
I incorporated this first round of user feedback into the FitTogether prototype and then embarked on what proved to be the most nerve-wracking part of the process: submitting the prototype to a professional user testing service. Four complete strangers tested two versions of the prototype I’d made and I got to listen to a recording of their comments as they worked through the app and I watched a recording of their screen as they tried to perform the tasks that I’d set for them to do. Here again, I learned that simpler was better. Another attempt I’d made to be clever in the exercise tracking function had simply confused them.
The user testing service turned out to be great, however. The testers all provided valuable feedback. One of the testers was incredibly poignant as he sighed and admitted how much he struggled to exercise and how he wish he had a support system like this one. That was the comment that made me decide to continue to develop the idea past the end of this course and see if I can actually turn the idea of FitTogether into a real product.
We all want to belong
Technology has given us so many cool products that help us do things quicker, faster, and better. At the same time, technology can leave us feeling lonely as real communities dissipate in the hustle and bustle of everyday live. We see plenty of images of young healthy people who are achieving their fitness goals and enjoying community at places like CrossFit, which have become social centers that revolve around exercise. It is my hope that FitTogether can provide community for people who are struggling with exercise and encourage them to create healthier lives for themselves.
View the product demo here: