Get challenged!

When we interviewed people about their fitness motivations a few months ago some of them said “sports is a lifestyle”. They also emphasized that the social aspect of doing sports is very important. Obviously, exercising with friends is much more fun than alone. Moreover, you are less likely to chicken out, because you owe it to your friend to show up.

With this in mind we were trying to come up with a way of supporting the social aspect of working out while at the same time increasing motivation.

The idea that we developed is about challenging your friends to complete a specific sports-related challenge within 24 hours. Therefore, an app could be used which helps the user to create challenges and verify their completion. Possible verification methods could be pictures, videos, referral by a friend or ideally data tracked by a wearable or smartphone.

In order to test the concept we set up and tested a prototype with a few people. We created a chat bot that sends a challenge to all participants every day for the period of a week. They were told to verify the completion of a challenge by sending a picture back as proof. Eventually, the users can compare themselves to each other by looking at a scoreboard which displays the completed challenges of everyone.

We hope to find out whether people are open minded about the concept of getting daily fitness challenges. Moreover, we are very interested in feedback about the verification methods. Is it bothersome for them to have to send a picture? Is it motivating seeing the pictures of others completing their challenges? Hopefully, we well be able to answer these questions after evaluating the experiment next week.

To be continued…