Let us proudly introduce Jake
In order to move forward with our project, we had to gain understanding of potential users. We interviewed six persons, who had different backrounds in sport and were athletic and interested about their welfare. With that sample we performed qualitative research using survey and interviews. First interviewees filled general survey which included such questions as an age, gender, amount of training, what sport they do and do they have a personal trainer or coach.
After survey, our interview consisted of open and specific yes/no questions with targeted topics, in which interviewees need to explain why or why not they do something. All the interview questions were related to the training. Interviewees answered questions about: challenges, goals, reasons to train, motivation factors, training data and tracking, do they train alone or with friends, where they were paying attention during training, importance of recovery and recovery related to hydration, food and rest.
Then we started the funniest part so far, defining the persona and the idea. At first, based on the interviews, we created different categories of interview responses. The categories helped us to identify various types of user challenges, motivational factors and habits. Based on the categories and the “How might we” method, we created the persona called Jake. Jake is a habitual trainer who trains about 4 times a week by running short distances. Together we defined Jake’s needs, wants and pain points and concluded the following:
Firstly, habitual trainers like Jake need to have some social stimuli throughout all phases of training (before, during and after) because it makes the training enjoyable and motivates them to a long term commitment. It seems that habitual trainers need to care about recovery after training, because it helps maintaining performance. We also gathered that habitual trainers need to be aware of their training technique (ways of training) because they don’t necessarily know how they can optimize their progress and avoid injuries. On top of that, habitual trainers need to get motivated in order to continue training, because training is a big time commitment in which apparent improvements are seldom seen in a short time frame. We should take these insights into account when developing our ideas further.
Ideation, easy or NOT?
During the ideation phase, we learned that design thinking is not a linear process. Hardest part for our team was, at the beginning, to understand how to use ”How might we” method. First, we didn’t define our scope clearly enough and questions came too broad. After initial difficulties, it was easy to generate different ideas for our persona. During the workshops we generated ideas by brainstorming a large quantity of ideas on post-its based on the points of views and “HMW” questions we had defined in our previous group meeting. After that, we switched the ideas with each other and elaborated them more with follow-up ideas. This was followed by combining ideas togethers and coming up with negative ideas and flipping those around to be positive. At the end, we had in total of 39 ideas from the workshop alone. The following picture is the masterpiece of our ideation.
Ideation part was especially fun and generating even wild ideas didn’t seem to be difficult for our team. After the workshop, we continued brainstorming in our online meeting. We proceeded to generate more possible solutions for Jake and came up with 22 new ideas. So, overall, we had 61 ideas from the workshop and the online meeting.
To get a clear picture of all the ideas, we grouped our ideas to 9 different groups: scheduling workouts, gamification, AI companionship, modified training-based emotions, goals displaying, technology information display, technology training assistant, technology recovery assistant, and reminding the user to stay hydrated.
The method which worked best for our team was “How Might We”. The method worked well after we had chosen the six “how might we” questions which best fitted our persona. Framing with the questions helped us to find the idea which could somehow solve most issues regarding how we would develop our idea further.
We were all excited by the idea where we would be able to combine many different ideas. Together we decided to start developing an idea that would be related to gamification and which would motivate the habitual trainers to move more holistically while making training fun. We decided to go for the idea of ”Tamagotchi 2.0”, which is essentially a virtual avatar that tracks data and which the trainer needs to take care of by training. We began to develop the idea further, and we considered the potential features, device options and interaction methods for “Tamagotchi 2.0”, which can be seen in our next blog post’s storyboard!
To keep things clear, here’s a summary of our brainstorming process
Working and using brainstorming methods as a team helped us to decide which areas to focus on. Ideation with the different methods helped us to focus on the user and develop better solutions for Jake. After all, ideation clarified our thoughts and strengthened our works as a team. Ideation clarified direction for the entire project and left us waiting for the next step.
