Fitso: Empowering a socially-fit lifestyle
Cheerfully Solved BY Design: Fitso is a mobile app empowering a socially fit lifestyle. Information overload and choice paradox is circumvented by the easy to use random workout generator. Users are encouraged to add fitness into their lives by social components such as feed, leaderboard and of course working out together.
“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good”. -Paul Rand
Background
A smartphone app which will help people improve their fitness. People who want to exercise more, but who — for various reasons — don’t get around to do it. Why not? With lockdown the situation only worsened. I know how difficult it is to get over the threshold and exercise. It is important to create a habit out of it. Leaving my own thoughts behind, I recruited 4 friends who don’t exercise as much as they like to and who are smartphone users for interviews. I wanted to learn more about their habits and motivations. I narrowed down the target group to females in the age group 25–34.
My goal was to find out:
— — Why they want to exercise?
— — What concretely happens when they do exercise?
— — What concretely happens when something prevents them from exercising?
In times of Corona, the interviews were conducted through a video call and the voices were recorded with permission to be only used for transcription.
Insight 1 The pandemic has also had its effect on the exercise patterns of the interviewees. Having to stay at home made them more willing to try out exercising
Insight 2 They get easily overwhelmed by the availably of too many workout programs and quit even before beginning
Insight 3 All interviewees are exercising alone when they do exercise. Even though they would prefer to do it with their friends
After these initial findings, I created a survey to get more results on motivation for exercising and to check for consistency. The idea was that a person who says that she wants to lose weight and then answers that she doesn’t exercise is inconsistent and most probably lacking motivation. At the end of the survey, I asked the participants to leave their e-mail behind if they would like to be contacted for a follow-up.
Most of the reactions were from people who were exercising frequently and had an exercising routine. There were also some that had various reasons for explaining why they don’t exercise often:
From the survey responses, I chose 2 people who gave answers that would shed more light into the problem and who had provided e-mail addresses.
Insight 4
When they do exercise the interviewees use YouTube videos for exercising. Since it has a low threshold, no subscription or commitment needed
Insight 5
There is a problem in starting with exercising and even when completing an exercise on one day, there is a lack of motivation to continue exercising on other days
Then, I made a competitive analysis to understand what the apps mentioned in the interviews are offering and what improvements could be made.
Defining the problem
In order to develop a clear understanding of which problem I will try to solve for my potential users, I made an empathy map and used this to create a persona.
The Point of View: A female adult who wants to exercise, but for some reason doesn’t, needs to find a way to exercise in order to stay fit, because she hasn’t formed a habit of exercising alone and finds excuses not to exercise. She wants to see immediate results and lacks motivation when she doesn’t see it.
Ideation
So how might we…
… Design a fitness app, which motivates young females to make exercise a habit and not solely focus on the short-term?
I divided this main question into subquestions:
How might we motivate users to exercise?
How might we make users follow a certain routine?
How might we encourage users to add exercising into their daily routine?
How might we ease the process of exercising?
How might we nudge users to make a habit of exercising?
How might we make people focus on process of gaining a healthy habit rather than (physical) results?
With these questions in mind, I moved to the SCAMPER method to come up with ideas:
Substitute:
Replace reminders with updates from friends
Combine:
Best elements to bring together such as website and app to cater for both users who like to exercise using their TVs at home and users who use their mobile phones
Adapt:
Duolingo style with leaderboards to encourage activity
Modify:
Change the focus: from achieving physical results to feeling good and seeing progress
Put to another use:
Different versions?
Eliminate:
Get rid of pre-defined workout plans, simplify the exercising process: don’t think, just do it
Reverse:
Reverse the process of exercising from being something boring to something social and fun
Then I checked the existing apps/websites and made initial sketches of the screens:
It’s also important to understand why and how a user would start using the app. That’s why, I created storyboards with Scenes, using the persona and initial sketches of the screens:
Designing the MVP
Testing
What I wanted to know from the testing was to what extent the design was usable, how people would interact with the app and their thoughts on the features. I made sure to add extreme users next to the target users as well, to gain insights from their interactions.
The first two participants were struggling with the Activity tab. To me, as the designer, it was obvious and step-wise. Seeing both of them having difficulties with finding the XP’s for a specific day, I iterated on the design and tested again with other users:
Throughout the testing, I was asking the participants on each screen what their thoughts were and what they liked and would like to improve. After the test, I also asked in general about their likes, possible improvements, and whether they would like to add something. The overall feedback that I received was not — as I had expected — focused on the Activity tab in particular. It seemed to me that the participants didn’t care much about the ease that they could find something, but rather more about the looks and feels of the app:
Final results
Next steps & Reflections
I enjoyed working on the project and liked to see it evolve in a short amount of time. As with every design project, it is never finished. There are more stuff that could be done to improve the project, such as linking to a website, enabling users to use their Smart TV’s to do the workouts. The possibility to see the exact workouts of friends would be interesting as well or the addition of achievements.
Apart from that, along the way I also learned from this project. In order not to scare off potential recruits, I took a general approach and did not define in the description of the survey that I’m particularly looking for people who want to exercise more, but somehow cannot do it. That’s why, I received many responses from people who made exercising a routine and are actually motivated. It was interesting to see their perspectives as well. For the next time, however, I would define the target group when looking for respondents.
