Project 1 :“ Buddy Up — support for people who want to be more physically active”

August 30th, 2017

UX Design Immersive Course makes sure students apply their acquired knowledge by doing a comprehensive project. Hence my class was given a challenge to compete our project in two and a half days. We were given one, very broad subject: Health.

The problem

It took me a long time to figure out what direction I want to go with my topic. I started drawing a bubble with “health” in it, and drew couple of ideas outside of it. I found that talking over the ideas with classmates was extremely helpful. Ultimately I decided that the subject of exercising and why people don’t exercise more often was worth pursuing.

The research

I started doing a brief research to find out basic information about benefits of exercising as well as statistics. This researched turned out to be productive as it proved my assumption that exercising is extremely beneficial to health on many different levels: from emotional and mental to physical health. In addition, I found couple of interesting statistics based on research from the report “The State of Obesity Report Series :Better Policies for a Healthier America 2016”-Trust for America’s Health & Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It stated, for example that 80% of American adults do not meet the government’s national physical activity recommendations for aerobic and muscle strengthening. That seemed like a lot so I decided to explore it further with the interviews.

The behaviors, needs and goals

I chose 7 individuals to interviewed. My screener’s criteria was simple: I needed people who do exercise but who felt like they don’t exercise enough. Based on the statistics above it was not a surprise that I found my subjects easily.

The people who I interviewed exercised from once a week to five times a week, however they still felt like they could exercise more often or longer. The subjects felt that they were too busy, or had multitude of excuses about why they could not exercise more. They liked different kinds of sports, like soccer, tennis, running, swimming, basketball, and yoga and pilates. None of the subjects were going to the gym and if they mentioned gym it was only to go for group classes there.

When I questioned further it was revealed that exercising with group of people was extremely satisfying for social reasons. Level of motivation to exercise decreased when they exercised alone. Affinity Mapping helped me come to my conclusion that to achieve the goal of frequent exercising people needed motivation from their peers and social activities was the best way to do so.

Based on the above research I was able to conclude that ff it comes to exercising majority of people find great value in it, however lack of motivation greatly reduces the participation. How can we create a supportive environment to increase the motivation to engage in exercise.?”

The designs

Based on the discovery I went on to design an app making sure it completes the following goal:

– eliminate the pain of commuting to/from exercise

– support from communities

– peer support and encouragement

– simple way to find the best activities

I began my design process by drawing couple of ideas on paper. I knew right away that I wanted to eliminate the “sign in” screen. The idea was to eliminate any unnecessary steps so as to not to add to the burden of “thinking about the exercising”. I wanted the user to dive in right away to the task at hand of finding the exercise group neary, that has exercise event in the next one to three hours. In a way, the app would work like Google Maps, where the user doesn’t’ have to sign in at all because the user is always signed in.

From there I went on to showing a map, with nearby activities. The idea was to eliminate the commute. Research showed that group activities generate excitement hence I concentrated on creating app that would show only group activities. I added feature of Messaging so that users could send themselves messages about which activity they are signing in to and encourage each other to attend. I stripped the app of any unnecessary, “extra” options, because I felt it would be a distractions to the users. The flowchart was also purposely as shallow as possible.

I draw the wireframe of the initial drawings and connected it on a rapid prototyping App called Marvel.

The iterations

I created 4 tasks that I tested with multiple users. After the first User Testing I learned about couple of problems. One of it was that I was missing a button to sign up for an activity. There were also other problems with back button and wrongly connected slides. After some heavy work on reiteration the further tests went through properly.

A demonstration

I demonstrated the app during a 4 minutes of presentation to classmates where I demonstrated my process using slides. To my presentation I included the documentation of my findings, including notes on the interviews, artifacts, etc…

Looking back I would definitively spend more time exercising how to go through the slides and definitively the app. Showing how the app works is difficult. I also learned never to use color on the slides, but make the Lo-Fi wireframes black and white. With more time I would make sure I paid more attention to the details and create couple of more paths. I also feel I could eliminate one more step between clicking on a activity nearby and seeing the activity main screen.

Overall I think it was a great experience of fast prototyping. It was difficult to go through the motion but very satisfying see the final results.