Overview

The goal for this project was to create a smartphone app that will help people improve their physical shape. The target group is people who want to exercise more, but who — for various reasons — don’t get around to it. This was created as a part of a course in design thinking at Interaction Design Foundation.

Research

I recruited six people who don’t exercise as much as they would like to and who are smartphone users. I conducted user interviews to ask about their motivations, habits and pain points regarding exercise and asked the participants to document and share workout-related situations (cultural probes).

Things that stood ut

• Hesitation to train in front of others, feeling exposed.
• Lack of a safe partner. Exercise might be more fun if joined by friends with a similar goal.
• It's easy to fall out of routine when other things are more important or appealing.

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Define

I sorted the answers in an affinity diagram to look for patterns and find themes. I then took quotes and keywords from the themes to create an empathy map of a target user. This helped me identify user needs. My problem statement describes the users problem, the desired state, and how it can be realised:

“A person who does not succeed in getting started exercising needs to find a fun and safe workout setting, and partners with similar ambitions and interests, so that it becomes fun to train and safe to measure performance.”

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Ideate

Next, I rephrased the problem statement into a few actionable questions which I used when ideating around the solution by brain-dumping my best and worst possible ideas.

How might we…

• … unite people with similar interests and physiques to train together?
• … make regular exercise exciting and easy-going?
• … measure performance with training partners in a safe and respectful way?
• … help people concretise their ambitions and set goals in training?
• … help people achieve their set goals in training?
• … inspire beginners to try a new form of exercise that can suit them?

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Evaluating and choosing ideas

I created quick sketches to explore competing ideas and refine parts that could meet the problem statement. I then drew storyboards at different touch-points from when a user decides to download the app to what happens when they use it. Presenting the storyboards to a target user helped me narrow it down to a more simple solution.

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Prototyping

I made wireframes focusing on the identified requirements for an MVP; exploration and creation of new training session, the workout session, and connecting with other users.

Testing it on target users helped me refine the user experience when browsing, creating and starting workout challenges as well as the accessibility during workout. After a few iterations I felt confident enough to create a more hi-fidelity prototype – applying UI elements and interactions.

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Key takeaways

Preparation has a great value to problem-solving, so don’t jump ahead in time and imagine a solution before thorough research and analysis of user problems.

Spend more time to test and iterate on the early low-fi wireframes – it will more likely be easily implemented, desired among users, and commercially viable.