Fitzen is a user experience that aims at motivating people to stay fit through a collaborative process. The experience will allow them to connect with other fitness enthusiasts and encourage them to stay fit and healthy.
This fitness system doesn’t solely depend on the gym; one can choose from a variety of outdoor activities and exercises. The system is based on providing the users with an interactive and engaging interface that helps keep them motivated through various features as listed below.
Digital avatar
Users will have their own digital avatars in the interface, which will be linked from bitmoji. The character will appear in various parts of the app and would become the display picture and a constant companion. One can, of course, skip this feature. The digital avatar’s physique can be set through the editable scroll bars given. It will then change according to the regime of the user. For example, if the avatar is initially chubby and goes through a weight loss regime after the plan gets over it’ll change the way it looks. It’ll get leaner. This will enable the users to develop a personal connection with the app.
Find Fitzens
The platform will enable the users to find more fitness enthusiasts in and around their vicinity and will help them to connect with each other through a ‘Find Fitzens’ feature. One can form a group that can exercise together. Through this process, we are trying to increase motivation in them to stay fit. The individuals in this interface would be referred to as fitzens and can chat with one another.
The interface also provides an option to the fitzens wherein they could collaborate with a specialized personal trainer. Even though our platform will be well equipped with all the workout and exercise-related information this feature this will add to a more personalized and intensive experience if desired by a Fitzen. The individual or the group can collectively choose a trainer based on his rating, timings and vicinity.
They can be added to the workout for a few sessions or for the whole plan. A feature to chat with and without the trainer is provided in the interface once the trainer is approved by all the group members.The trainer will be paid according to the number of sessions he conducts, the interface would charge a part of his salary as a commission.
Further, a reward and badge system is incorporated in the interface that will keep the users motivated, a Fitzen can collect multiple badges to level up and appear on the leaderboard. To make the experience more engaging, interesting our interface also has things like A radio which will have podcasts by well-known instructors, energetic playlists in various languages accompanied by fitness trivia. A section of news feed that will contain articles about health and fitness that would notify the users of various fitness-related events around.A nutrition page to help you make the best out of your workout regime and ease the process of reaching your aim.
All of this is still a work in progress, as a group we went through many discussions, brainstorming sessions and a huge complicated process to reach where we are. Here is a glimpse of the process.
The concept of the application Fitzen is something we developed over a course of one month. It took a lot of refining, filtering, rewriting and development of multiple briefs in order to reach the stage we are currently at. We started our ideations by analyzing various systems and experiences around us. Some of our initial ideas included — studying of the tax system, parking and space design, education system, cooking and nutrition for youth, RTO process, home science education and change in mindsets.
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A lot of the things that we wanted to work upon came under the umbrella word adulting. We then started focusing on what adulting meant to us and what all topics will be included in it. We defined ‘adulting’ as the process through which we could inculcate habits that a young person would require to know as and when he enters the adult world. Our aim was to ease this transformation by educating them about taxes and finance, some basic home science and life skills and health and nutrition.
After researching and contemplating on the above topic we decided to narrow it down to health and nutrition and then further focused on one of its aspects, fitness. Once we were focused on one system we started exploring our options for the target market. After talking to a lot of people we realised that when it comes to fitness it’s very difficult to motivate someone who does not want to do anything about it and hence we focused on people who are trying to be fit but are struggling to stay motivated.
We went to various fitness spots like gym, riverfront, yoga class, and gardens in order to engage with the users. This process gave us clarity and helped us understand who our target audience is, what are the problems they face. This helped us in making a list of things that keep fit people motivated to exercise and how we could inculcate some of their methods into our system.
As a part of our research, we also looked at different fitness and workout apps that are being used by our target audience currently in order to understand their interface.
After analysing and categorizing all the information we started listing down things we found most important and would like to include in our user experience. One of the main things we derived from our conversation with the users was that its easier to stay motivated when one has a companion or a group of people to exercise with. The two main terms that we started focusing on for our user experience were collaboration and motivation and our final brief for the same was: Motivating people to exercise more through a collaborative process.
Through our interface, people will be able to connect with others to exercise with them. Hence, we decided to keep that as one of our main features and USP of our user experience. We tried to build on the idea of a companion and take it to a digital platform and make a digital avatar of the same. We thought of keeping it as a constant feature in our app that could represent the user. We later developed on the idea of the character add another characteristic to it, the weight and body type of the avatar would be a reflection of its user i.e. if a person completes the target set by him his digital avatar would look accordingly.
Rewarding our users by giving them badges would be another way through which we thought of giving fitzens some motivation. Earlier we were just planning on giving them some rewards like regularity badge, and goal completion badge, etc. But later on, we changed it to an animal-based reward system. If a person is very regular and in exercise and is loyal to their regime he will get a badge of a dog, if a person is a fast runner he will get a cheetah badge and so on.
After discussion, we realised that people who are just starting out with their regime might want to work out with someone who has been exercising for a long time. This gave us the idea of adding a trainer to the system. We decided to give an option to the group if they would want to exercise with a trainer or workout alone.
We also thought of making custom plans for individuals based on their medical history and their aim. The users would be given a few options out of which they will have to choose a plan and add it to their calendar. This would be recorded in their schedule calendar where one could see the plan of the whole month. Once the goal has been accomplished user will to set another aim and browse more plans.
Some of the users also gave us feedback that they like to listen to things other than songs. This gave us the idea of adding features like radio where we included different podcasts and trivia along with songs. We also added a nutrition page to make educate people about the food they need in their diet to reach their goal and a fitness news feed that keeps people aware of workout information and tell them about fitness events that are happening around them.
