Looking for a Workout Partner? Your mobile phone could be the best one
Finally, after 3 months of hard work, I am proud to present you “Workout partner”, the prototype for a mobile APP created as a capstone project for the Coursera HCI Design Specialization. Based on the topic of “Change”, I soon realized how mobile phones could improve one of the most pursued changes of society nowadays: physical change. It might seem superfluous, but I strongly believe that the same device which makes you waste an hour of your time looking at Instagram before going to bed, can be the disruptive detonator of the change when trying to achieve a change in your lifestyle, becoming healthier and enjoying the travel to your new body.
The Concept
As a gym user, I have detected some common problems that easily drive to frustration for new users, and wanted to create a really simple app focusing in 4 different aspects of the training.
· It would be an internal app for the gym, so that every information given is useful on that gym’s machines and classes.
· Users could see daily’s activities which would take place on the gym, book the assistance to a fitness class and also see who of their friends in the activity is attending.
· Coaches would be able to create training programs for the users, with pages for every exercise explaining how to do it properly using text, images and video. Also, in case of any doubt a button allows the user to ask a coach for help, so he will go directly to the machine where the user is training.
· Advanced users could have a tracking of their evolution, inputting the weight lifted and measuring the time of the training.
The design process
With all this in mind, I decided to create an APP which made training easier and more social. I have been working in web design industry for some years, so I thought it would be an easy task. But the capstone project made me change my mind and go all the way down, going step to step, starting with some quick mockups on paper, and then cutting and pasting them to create a first semi interactive version of the app, in which I moved pieces of paper around when the user interacted touching the initial papers. I had never given any importance to that step before, and always started to design interaction directly on the screen. That previous handcraft process gave me a lot of information, and allowed me to create new navigation buttons whenever the user felt stuck. My initial app structure was that way quite best than it used to be, and then created a digital prototype using Axure. I had it tested by 3 friends, and later by other 3 students of the specialization course. Feedback given by all of them was unanimous: my app was different from any other fitness app, and users would really like to try that concept.
During this testing process, I detected that giving more importance with all the friend-related functionality would improve the experience of training for my users, as they would easily add friends from the first day, without having to consciously look for it. So I moved that option from the user menu to the main navigation bar, and tested it using Usertesting.com, an incredible website which allows you to get segmented users all over the world to test any website or app in just some minutes. My A/B Testing confirmed the change was good, as all of the users completed their tasks more easily than on the other version.
After all the research, I am quite proud of the prototype of my app (you can test it here). It is different to any other fitness app in the market, at it is really focused on improving the experience of the user inside a private gym, being really useful for them. I really think an app like “Workout partner” would allow users to reach their goals easily.
This is the video which presents the concept of my app.