A mobile Fitness App

Goal

Being healthy and fit plays an ever increasing role in peoples lifes. However there are various reasons and factors that cause people to not work out as regularly as they desire to. The goal is to design a smartphone app which will help people to improve their fitness. The target group is people who want to exercise more, but who -for various reasons - don't get around to it.

My role

• User Research
• Persona creation
• Problem definition
• Hosting and facilitating meetings for team related activites
• Prototype creation
• Testing

Approach: Design Thinking

This case study follows along the design thinking process as tought in the Design Thinking - The Beginner's Guide by the The Interaction Design Foundation as displayed in the image below.

The Design Thinking process follows covers five stages: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. During the Empathize stage designers perform user research in order to gain an empathetic understanding of the users desires and needs. This data is turned into a definite problem statement during the Define stage. A clearly defined problem enables the Ideate stage. During this stage the team comes together to brainstorm possible solutions for the problem. The team decides on a possible solution and creates one or more prototypes during the Prototype phase. The prototype(s) are given to a selected user group to test. The tests should generate further insights about the users needs as well as desires and initiate design changes.
The design thinking process is an iterative process and the steps don't necessarly have to be followed in sequence. However the appropriate steps should be iterated through until the team comes up with a satisfying design.
This process is ideal for startups and therefore it was chosen for this project.

Disclaimer: To ensure that all data gathered during this design process stays confidential I have omitted and appropriated confidential information.

Empathise - The discovery phase

The goal is to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem I am trying to solve. To gain this knowledge I need to understand people's needs, thoughts, emotions as well motivations that drive them towards improving their fitness.

Interviews with potential users

The empathize stage was an explorative effort, that allowed me to gather as much information as possible, through interviews with potential users of the fitness app. By combining interviews with research on social media I was able to gather diverse data about people who want to improve their fitness.

In order to find interviewees, from various backgrounds, I have reached out to my family and friends as well as to people on social media. I have found participants for the interview in a facebook group for women who want a makeover for their health and fitness, as well as in my personal circle. The aim of each interview was to answer the following main questions:

1. Why people want to exercise
2. What concretely happens when they do manage to exercise
3. What concretely happens when something prevents them from exercising?

In addition to the interviews I searched for people who documented their fitness story on instagram or twitter. The purpose of the social media search was to find more data about how people motivate themselves to stick to a workout routine and what challenges they were facing during the beginning of their journey.

The data collected during the interviews, as well as social media reserch, was used to define the problem to be solved in theDefine phase.

Define

The goal is to develop a clear understanding of which problem I will attempt to solve for the potential users.
The define phase includes the following activities:

• Affinity Diagramm: Analyze and identify the major themes in the data
• Empathy Map: Find out how participants think, feel, talk and react
• Define Personas Point of view to crystalize their needs
• Persona creation

Affinity Diagram

I clustered the data from the user interviews into the following main groups. These are not user groups, but rather main topics of what motivates and prevents people from working out:

1. Underlying health issue: Workout relieves the pain
2. Vanity: People who work out to look good
3. Maintenance: People who want to maintain their agility throughout their lifes
4. Schedule: People workout when they have a schedule and stick to it
5. Lack of commitment: People skip workouts, because they let things get in the way
6. Environmental restrictions: Sometimes a workout is skipped, because of weather, or it would disturb others, etc.

Empathy Map

Needs
• App that motivates them
• Ability to engage and commit socially
• Help prioritizing things that need to be done in a week, including workouts
• App that tracks progress
• App that displays relevant data
• App that helps them stay healthy

Personas

I used personas constantly throughout the project to guide the design phases, design decisions, priorities, and create empathy amongst the client and the team.

Point of View

Ideate

The purpose of this phase is to generate ideas and solutions. With the help of the point of View statement of the previous chapter, I was able to define the following "How might we questions" to crystalize the users needs:

How might we...
• ... motivate people to work out?
• ... help them set goals?
• ... help them commit to those goals?
• ... help them track their progress?
• ... help them track their health?
• ... help them to engage socially?

• Competitor Analysis
• User Flow
• Brainstorming

Competitor Analysis

For the competitor analysis, I have selected a handful of fitness apps and social media apps. I have identified the fitness apps by searching for motivating fitness apps. I have decided to include YouTube and Instagram, because both apps are used for the distribution of all kinds of workouts as well as diet plans. Additionally Instagram can be used as a diary to track ones progress. The features list in the table below are not complete, I am just focusing on features which are relevant for the personas needs.