FOR

General Assembly UX
Design Immersive 10-week Course

ROLES

UX Research
UI Design

SUMMARY

What’s the problem?

With the Singaporean government emphasising on healthy lifestyles, I placed the research focus on people who lack the motivation to work out, to find out why they don't exercise.

User interviews

5 participants, young adults ranging from ages 24 to 40.

Key focus area

• How often do you exercise?
• What kind of exercises do you do?
• What’s your reason for exercising?
• What are the challenges you face when you try to exercise?
• What will make you exercise more?

Research synthesis

Through the interviews and synthesis of the data, the key trends found were:

WHY DO YOU WORK OUT?

Participants want to work out to stay healthy and keep fit

WHY DON’T YOU WORK OUT THEN?

Users need to find time out of their schedule in order to work out, or exercising is not their priority

WHAT WOULD MAKE YOU WORK OUT?

Motivations come from friends or even like-minded strangers.

The three-pointers helped identify a problem that I needed to solve.

THE PROBLEM

Young adults need an efficient way to find time and motivation out of their working or studying schedules to exercise to stay healthy and keep fit.

THE SOLUTION

By providing users with a hassle-free way to match or alert potential workout sessions through their interests and friends' participation, the app helps increase their motivation to exercise and keeps them healthy

And "Right Fit to Get Fit" app was born!

The goal of the app is to identify possible exercising opportunities to the user and encourage them to join the activities they are interested in taking.

Designing the app

A user flow was drafted out to match the core functionalities of the app.

REGISTRATION

• Identifying users’ sports interest and friends during this process helps the pairing process.
• Having the ability to explore and skip was important since research shows users have time constraints.
• Backend sync to user’s calendar is also key to identify their free time.

JOINING AN ACTIVITY

• Notifications system to alert them of activity matches attempts to motivate them
• The process of requesting and approval to join activity is mapped out

Prototyping

Initial paper sketches helped define what elements I might have missed out as I tried interactions with the low fidelity prototypes.

Interactive Paper Prototype:
https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/AFOSG2EZYEQ

Instructor and friends were pulled in to try interacting with the low fidelity prototype and the following iterations were made:

• Details of matches
  Users wanted to know more about the activity, like types of equipment and intensity.
  
  
• Adding activity to a calendar
  Users wanted to an option to add to the smartphone calendar to serve as a reminder.

Adobe Illustrator was used to creating the higher fidelity prototype and I created the interactive version on Invision.

Right Fit to Get Fit
Interactive Prototype

QUOTE OF THE PROJECT

"A person who never made a mistake
never tried anything new"

- Albert Einstein

Learnings and reflections

• Getting feedback and raising questions
  Making mistakes was the key highlight of this project, as I originally failed to identify a proper problem statement. It could have been prevented by just receiving tips from the instructor or teaching assistants, especially when I’m new to the process.
  
  
• Relooking into a problem statement
  Utilising the whats, whys and hows and re-synthesising the results helped me frame a more conclusive problem statement.
  
  
• Focus on the core solution
  As I only had 4 days to work on the project, trying to push more features is not helpful in meeting deadlines. I should focus on the Minimum Viable Product first.
  
  
• Paper prototyping skills
  Being a digital-based designer, I was eager to transfer paper prototypes to digital format. I should practice more on paper to improve my sketches (which I bought a graph paper to help define a grid later on)

If you’re a fitness buff reading this or just someone who needs some motivation to work out, let me know what you think!