Your Move

Your Move
4-week Solo Student Project
Dublin, Ireland/Remote

Challenge

The brief was to reframe and design an activity tracker, driven by psychological needs around well being and not by duty and competition. A week after receiving the brief, COVID-19 pandemic lockdown began, casting the design challenge in a new light, and making research with people, and about movement, the real challenge.

Design Solution

Your Move is an app concept designed to help users have fun with their friends and maybe get a few extra steps in without meaning to. It uses a user's fitness tracker data in real time to drive play in a variety of simple games that they can played on their own or with friends. Ultimately, conducting remote online research exploring a topic as out-of-doors and on-the-go as exercise showed that a little innovation can go a long way in challenging times.

My Process

Remote Generative Research

I paired user interviews through Zoom with a survey distributed through Facebook and Instagram to reach a wider audience. My questions explored peoples' habits around exercise, fitness tracking, social media, and gaming apps, as well as the emotional motivation behind these activities.

Key findings were

People were spending a lot of time watching Instagram and Facebook stories, but were more reluctant to post them themselves.
Mental health was just as big a motivator behind exercising as physical health.

Personas and Scenarios
I used the research to develop three personas that explored types of people who might want more activity in their day, but are not motivated by, or were intimidated by, the formal idea of "exercise", and who might be familiar with social media, but have a more passive presence.

Prototype Sketching and Wireframing

Taking the research, I began to sketch out some ideas for what kind of games a user might play in the app. I wanted something that had a low learning curve, could be played against the app or with friends, and could be played in a relatively short amount of time, but still with an activity pay off.

Research also led me to focus on games that could be played in real time, since the idea of storing up steps or other activity to pay off later in a game made the game playing too easy to dismiss.

Remote Experience Prototyping

I decided on checkers as a game to test out the concept because it was simple enough to learn, but still complicated enough to require some thought. In addition, the pieces themselves mimicked some of the movements testers might be doing in person.

I engaged a 4 user testers to play some rounds of checkers via a free online game, with the stipulation they had to run in place for a set amount of steps before each move, and do a set amount of jumping jacks before each jump.

The experiment had two major outcomes:

It was apparent from the get-go that trackers we unreliable and inconsistent in tracking steps in real-time, and the amount of time it took each player to do their fitness task varied a lot, leading to choppy game play. For subsequent rounds, players were given a set amount of time in which they were meant to try and accomplish a high number of steps, leading to a smoother game and an extra element of competition.
The second major finding was that we all felt silly doing it. With ultimately spiced up an old classic like checkers, and made the experience fun.

High Fidelity Prototype