Do you even lift?
Transforming how you view the gym with our accountability-focused fitness app.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
Individual
Duration
5 months
/01 Context
Don't just get active, get STARTED.
Success in the gym often comes from the combination of two things: consistency and accountability. While some strive to reach harmonization of both, most often fail before they have even truly started. I seek to bridge the gap between person and fitness through an accountability-focused fitness app.
/02 Research
Real insights, from real people.
The easiest way for me to gather research was to ask people directly about their experiences with gym, fitness, calories, etc. An initial survey garnered me 17 responses. Questions from the survey ranged from age to energy levels.
Survey Results
User Interviews
The results from the surveys provided a lot of great insights. One thing that stood out was the amount of people who made fitness goals and how many of those people were consistent for 7 weeks or less. I had to dive deeper through user interviews to see if there was any correlation to the inconsistency and lack of tracking for their goals.
Throughout the user interviews, I was able to learn a lot more about how users felt about their fitness journey and their pain points when it came to motivation and consistency.
Affinity Map
Learning about my interviewees was great, but I needed to be able to visually organize what they said into related groups. By using an affinity map, I was able to achieve this goal and it allowed me to see the qualitative data a bit clearer than before.
By the end of the affinity mapping session, I was able to unearth three different, underlying themes.
User Persona
Creating a user persona allowed me to summarize all of the insights that I have gathered thus far from the user interviews, affinity map creation, and theme discovery. It became a useful tool that I would often go back to and revisit when I needed a refresher on who I am trying to design for.
/03 Brainstorming
"It's not just about the idea, it's about the viability of it"
During the brainstorming and ideation process, the scale of my solutions ranged from AR glasses to a mobile application. Although AR glasses would have been a really interesting thing to tackle, the viability of it might not have been there yet. AR glasses would take a lot time and cost than I have at the moment. But the good thing was that, a mobile application might be able to do the same task without all the extra cost and lengthy development.
MVP
An MVP or Minimum Viable Product is an early version of the product that has just enough features that would make it usable. By reviewing my users' needs, I was able to develop an MVP with 5 core functions.
/04 Low-Fidelity
Bringing the MVP to life through early-stage designs
Now that I had the Minimum Viable Product mapped out, I needed to establish what would soon be the early prototype. This required three things: mapping out important user flows, rudimentary sketches of key screens, and low-fidelity wireframes.
User Flows
Through the development process, three user flows were established: an account access flow, a workout plan flow, and a social flow.
Sketches
The user flows were then used to roughly sketch out key screens for the upcoming wireframes.
Early sketch of the account access flow
Wireframes
Having wireframes allowed me to get a more detailed view of what the first iteration of the prototype is going to be without needing to worry about applying the style.
/05 High-Fidelity
Applying style to foundation
Why warm colors? I wanted the colors for STARTED to match the feelings that the product is supposed to evoke towards the user. Those feelings should be feelings of power, encouragement, inspiration, aspiration, motivation, energy and strength.
Prototyping
With the style decided, it was time to implement it into functional prototypes that I could use to further test the concept.
Usability Testing
I ran multiple usability testings with slight improvements after each one and was able to come out with a final iteration. There were a few issues that I came across during the tests such as users failing to complete certain tasks, but most usability issues were resolved.
/06 Post-Project Completion
What did I learn?
I believe that although STARTED ended up being overall successful when it came to the usability testing, there isn't much data yet to fully determine whether or not this app could thrive in the competition. There's a possibility for its place but it is something that needs to be determined with more research and testing.