Active
Fitness Together
The Challenge
To reduce the barrier between thinking about exercising and actually exercising by connecting with other interested individuals.
Course
Information Architecture
My Team
Chloe Reshetar-Jost, Liam DeCoste, Patrick Chao
My Responsibilities
Conducted three interviews, worked on the research analysis, moderated one round of user testing, collaborated on the designs and architectural strategy.
My Role
Interaction Designer
Our Advisor
A. Seay Fleaming
Timeline
10 weeks
LET'S GET SOME CONTEXT
What is Active?
Active is a platform that facilitates people coming together to exercise. The emphasis of the application is to connect people one-on-one who have similar interests when it comes to exercising and staying active.
How does it work?
Having a work out partner is known to help people stay motivated and this app is the ideal platform to find a workout partner with similar fitness goals. The user is able to set filters, such as area boundaries, age ranges, and even mutual friends to help connect with the right person.
Competitive analysis
We examined numerous fitness apps and found 15 applications that had similar goals in terms of either the social aspect of fitness, or in inculcating a healthy attitude towards fitness.
What we looked at...
What types of data they are collecting?
Who are their target users?
What are the key features being offered?
Do they want to know the user's activity level?
Are exercise partners or group activities part of the app?
USER RESEARCH
Our research included surveys and user interviews with participants aged between 21- 62 years old. We ensured that we recruited users from a mix of fitness backgrounds.
What kind of data we collected...
Demography
Exercise Experience Level
Pain points in their Fitness routine
65 Surveys
Friendship App Experience
Meet-up Experience
Exercise Partner
Functions
11 Interviews
What we learned...
We went through interviews one by one and began pulling out the requirements and needs of the users. The survey data continued to inform the requirements and pain points, and it provided us with quantitative data to help substantiate findings.
People like to work out with others on the same fitness level.
Scheduling and getting to a place to work out is a hassle.
Weight lifting and Climbing were the most popular activities to do with others.
Our target age group would be people aged between 20-30 years.
Having pictures in the apps made people feel comfortable.
Safety was a concern when meeting people on apps.
Architectural Strategy
Features the research led to...
Onboarding
Grid Style Interface
Connection Transparency
In-App Chat
Information/Blogs
Profile Requirement
System Content Blueprint
Navigation Map
wireframes
We created wireframes for the 4 main tasks that users would flow through in the app.
product design decisions
Mood Board
We began this step of the design process by collecting images and constructing a mood board.
Energy and Playfulness
We were inspired by imagery that conveyed a sense of energy and playfulness, and these are some key feelings that we want users to experience as they use our application.
Light Background
We decided to use a light background instead of a dark background, as we felt the dark theme gave off a more private feeling and we want our app to help users be social.
Saturated Colors
By collecting images into a mood board, we were able to decide on a color scheme with saturated colors to make the app feel more vibrant.
Style Tile
We constructed our style tile to include our main color palate, font choices, and key design decisions such as navigation and profile cards. This style tile helped guide our design, making sure that our uses of font, color, and overall feel were consistent.
Hi-fidelity mockups
Onboarding
Connect
Connections and Messages
Profile and Explore
user testing
We used the RITE methodology for our user testing of the application.
Examples from RITE testing
“I don’t love the aesthetic yet, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing, but it looks like it’ll be very user friendly.” - P1
“Set up very much like a dating app, I have some confusion regarding the likes” -P3
“What happens if I don’t want to connect with Sean ever? If I click the ‘X’ it takes me back to the home page but there’s no way for me to say no.” - P7
“Looks nice, like how it shows what they are into right when you click on them” - P8
finalizing the solution
reflecting back
Although this project began in-person and ended remotely due to COVID-19, the team was able to work well together to design and prototype a mobile application that could potentially fill a gap present in the fitness/social app market.
Some areas of improvement for the future version of the application.
Improve Safety Measures : Although we provided links to the person's social media, and provided users with the ability to report other users, we still feel that there is more that can be done in terms of safety, but we haven’t addressed that enough.
Groups: Due to certain time restrictions we were not able to design features such as Group Events and Challenges. These two features were conceptualized to help users feel more comfortable in meeting new people online.
Gamification: It would help people engage with the app further and feel motivated to attend more events.
Wearable Connectivity: Ability to incorporate data from fitness and wearable devices.