Case Study — Creating a Survey and User Interview for a Fitness App
Learning how to do quantitative and qualitative user research for a UX/UI project
In our third week of UX/UI Bootcamp at DesignBoat school, we learned how to conduct qualitative and quantitative user research, which included conducting User interviews and survey questionnaires.
Our team opted for the fitness domain, and while working on the ideas of the design app, we came up with several options for the problem statement and the features that can be added to the app. But before jumping on that, our mentor Abhishek told us that whatever we think as a problem is a potential problem, and once we do user interviews, we will be redefining that problem statement.
Quantitative research:
For the quantitative research, we created a Fitness survey. This was a group activity, so we did a whiteboard exercise online and came across multiple questions. Now it was time to pick the relevant questions, and that’s when I came across the lean survey method. I downloaded this template, and it was super helpful.
You may download the template here.
I took a printout of this format on an A3 paper. After documenting all the questions for the survey, I jolted down multiple questions on sticky notes and started pasting them. Once I finished posting the questions, it was time to arrange them in order and remove a few relatively similar questions. Once finalized, I wrote the questions on the sheet itself. And this is how it looked.
Final Survey
After this, it was very easy to post them on the google survey form. The survey is still open; feel free to submit your response. Our team forwarded it to friends and acquaintances and posted it on different social platforms. We received a total of 150+ responses. I documented the following inferences.
1. What is your age group?
2. How often do you work out?
3. What are the factors that prevent you from working out?
4. Recent research suggests that Covid is less likely to affect people leading an active lifestyle. Does this motivate you to work out?
5. What are your favorites activities for a workout? (multiple answers could be selected)
6. How do you prefer to track your workout?
7. Would you like to have options of booking gyms on a daily or weekly basis?
8. How much would you like to spend on your fitness goals each month?
9. Which of the following would you prefer to choose to achieve your fitness goals?
Quantitative research
Documenting questions for the qualitative research was again a team exercise and we did brainstorming for the questions to be finalized for interviews. From a pool of 30–35, our team shortlisted 15 questions for the user interviews. They are listed below.
Qualitative interview summary
I selected three people for the user interviews from different backgrounds, who had varied fitness levels. I was able to discover new questions, while speaking to them, on basis of their experience and responses. For example, one person didn’t like the idea of going to a gym and working out in closed spaces, so we talked more about her preferred activities.
After conducting the qualitative interviews I gathered that due to the Covid crisis, there was more awareness about health and fitness in different age groups. People would like to have a balance between healthy meals and increased activity levels. I will share more about this in the Persona and Empathy Maps.
Learnings from this research
One of the most important things that I learned from this user research is not to assume the problem and solution on the user’s behalf. Instead, the only way to understand it is to go out and invest time in talking to them and understanding their issues.
What’s next?
In the coming week we will be learning about Personas and User Journey Map, so stay tuned for more updates.
