Life UP is a fitness app that consists of many features that can help the user stay motivated and lead a healthier lifestyle. For this project, my group and I decided to use goal-directed design which focuses on our persona creation and their goals.
The competitive audit helped us gain a better understanding of features we could consider including in our app, based on successful features in similar apps. I gathered information relative to health and fitness. I researched many apps that are popular and highly rated on the app store. I found Sweatcoin, Charity Miles, and MyFitnessPal.
Sweatcoin, Charity Miles, and other similar apps seem to be popular for having some form of reward, and while our app doesn’t have as much of a tangible reward, we feel achievements would fit into a form of psychological reward and wanted to look at how they provided rewards so we could see how we could layout our achievements, leaderboards, etc. MyFitnessPal is very popular and tracks nutritional/food intake in addition to exercise, and because this seems to be very popular among fitness and health apps, we thought it would be an obvious addition, and one we would want to base off of successful implementations -- specifically convenience features such as barcode scanning for nutritional info. Apple Health, much like MyFitnessPal, is very popular and is widely used, and has many useful features such as notifications, and general tracking of steps/exercise, as well as scheduling and routines for a healthier lifestyle.
After looking at other apps we used app reviews and found what the users felt the app lacked and what the user praised the app for doing. Compiling all this data allowed my group and I to keep what the user said in mind before jumping into face-to-face user interviews.
For the literature review, we wanted to look at the effects of achievements or psychological motivators, as well as effective tips and ways to exercise and build a fitness routine. The use of achievements, at least in games, seems to work well because they can act as a way to “hook” people into doing them, and then wanting to complete more.
Additionally, achievements can also act as social proof, a way to say “I did it”, and not only sets standards for performance in most cases but also allows for a way to compare your own performance to others. Achievements seem to work well in games, and so we thought it would be a good consideration as a feature for our app, especially considering we wanted to go for a “gamer” theme.
From our interviews, we gathered information about our users. The questions we asked helped us understand the user we are designing for. We also interviewed an expert on this subject, who is a trainer at a gym I go to. I contacted each interviewee and set up the time and place it was being hosted. This was difficult due to everyone's schedule not being aligned, but we made it happen.
Once we conducted the interviews, we used the information to begin the the affinity mapping. This is where we put everything we learned and either validated what we thought, or countered our ideas prior to the interviews.
Name: John Richardson
Age: 21
Occupation: Full-time student with a Part-Time Job
End Goal:
Life Goal:
John wants to be filled with motivation and lead a healthier lifestyle overall.
Bio:
John follows a somewhat healthy lifestyle, but having 4 classes and a part-time job hinders his ability to maintain a productive lifestyle. He enjoys working out but procrastinates often. John wants to get in a habit of working out during his free time. He also feels that his eating habits have gone down the drain once he got to college. He finds himself eating a lot of fast food due to convenience and doesn’t think twice about it. John has been wanting to get back in shape and he needs something or someone to motivate him to bring his healthy habits back in place.
After developing the persona, we had to have developed a scenario that our persona, John, would do in his daily life.
John wakes up in the morning, the first thing he does is checks his phone. He goes through his apps and then he checks Life UP. In the app he notices that his daily goals were updated, this makes John extremely motivated to complete those goals.
Also, John decides to check the friend leaderboard and he notices that his friends are beating him already. This makes John even more motivated to get on with his day and be more productive. While John was putting on his running shoes, he receives another notification from Life UP saying that he is now in the last place on his friend leaderboard.
John goes on his run. After the run, he decides to check Life UP again to see if he has climbed the leaderboard. He notices that he has, in fact, climbed the leaderboard and yet again he is in the first place. Before John goes to bed, he checks his Life UP app to view his daily data at a glance. This way John sees his results. John likes to compare them to see how he could improve the next day.
When it came to prototyping, we had to make a wireframe to illustrate how the app was going to look based on our persona. This app had to cater to the persona's needs and wants. Our group came up with this wireframe and following this we jumped into mapping the key path scenario.
This is where I stepped in. Once our team completed the wireframe, I went through and made sure the key path scenario was fitting for our persona. These are the screens that John will be using every time he opens and uses Life-Up. Once I mapped out the key path, I went on to the next step.
When making this, I made sure to keep the persona in mind and label the screens he would use multiple times and screens he would rarely use. This validates the key path scenario and allows our team to see if the key path was correct. This lets our team know what screens are important and should be easily navigated to for the persona.
For user testing, I set up all the testing time with the users and lead them. The results validated most of our ideas, as well as, giving us new or better ideas that would help improve the user experience using the app. This information helped make this application into a full suctioning prototype.
