Tracking exercise should be easier than this.

One of the most frustrating things to many in this century is to use multiple applications to complete one task. I have heard people in their 50s to people in their 20s complain about convenience factors surrounding things in their everyday life. And one of those complaints is surrounding exercise, and tracking your exercise. I decided to help solve this issue.

At the beginning of this project, I decided to pay attention to not only my everyday routine, but some of those around me. I realized one day, why is it that I have 5 fitness applications that I actively use? Well because one is for a local studio to book classes, one of my regular gym, one is a FitBit, one is MyFitnessPal, and I have another local studio application. I dug into why I use each of them and then talked to others to see if they had the same issue. It turns out, people are really really frustrated with having to use multiple mobile applications to track their fitness calendar and goals.

Bingo. Here is my inspiration for my final project in my Interaction Design certificate. I took this inspiration and began to run with it by choosing first the key components for this application. It was very early on in the process that I figured out that I could not use everything from every fitness application and merge it into one. That is just not possible and it would overwhelm pretty much every person that uses it. After analyzing applications like FitBit and studio applications, I decided on the following components:

- Progress bar -> Many fitness applications, if not all, have a progress bar, but this one is unique. The progress bar tracks your goal of how many days a week you work out. The focus is not your weight or eating, but how often you work your body.

- Booking a class and your bookings -> Booking a class is simple in the application. You are given a list of classes for the week, color coded by exercise type, and you choose an open time by day. There is more information provided about the class and a simple book button. You can then view all of your booked classes on a page as well. Simple, quick, and clean was the objective with booking a class. You do not need to waste time figuring things out which is why the page is clean and not full of lots of colors or distractions.

- My calendars -> This is the backbone of the inspiration and the most important part of this application. Without this page, there would be no purpose to this application. On the calendars page, you can import the calendars from your local workout studios, gyms, your work calendar, personal calendar, and so on. These calendars automatically sync up, and when you go to your booking a class page, the page shoes availability based on your sync’d personal and work calendars.

Once I had the backbone and main ideas developed, I was able to develop a prototype and conduct 2 rounds of user testing. From these rounds I was able to compare and contrast how users reacted from screens, their first impressions, and their thoughts on the flow of the application. The hardest part is to not influence users when they complete the testing. It is unbelievable how many people did not understand what the progress bar represented, and the bar had to go through several rounds of sketches and iterations until I reached a final design. But at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to please every single user and their needs.

The one thing I consistently heard from users though was how much they appreciated a simple, clean, and consistent design. They could easily navigate screens, and did not have to question if they were going down the correct path as they completed the task I had assigned them. I also heard from users that this is an application that they would use — and no I had not had that as a question in my user testing. This was validation that I had found a true gap between what is out on the market, and what users actually need in their daily lives.

At the end of the day, users wants to be able to complete a task within one application, do it quickly, and not have issues during the process. I was able to identify and prototype a solution to help users with their fitness goals. My prototype called FitnessDay helps user easily book workout classes for their week before their personal and work schedule fills out. If want to look around check out the final prototype here: https://invis.io/SZ84NV0EG and enjoy!