KELLY CHANG .

Background

Exerceed is an iOS app that helps people cultivate the habit of exercise . It was a solo project in the Mobile Experience Design course at Pratt. I chose “enhancing exercise motivation” as my mobile project topic, exploring visual and emotional design to bring different possibilities for users.

The Discovery

Having interviewing 4 people, I found there were 3 types of users: training-focused, ball sports lover, and those starters without any exercise habit. Since the training-focused user and ball, sports lover may have already been exercising pretty regularly, they usually don’t have any big problem on the table. Therefore, I chose to focus on the user type who lacks exercise habit but would like to improve their current situation.

Based on my research on the pain points of my target user, I defined the design opportunities—

• Design for simple exercise, so users won’t feel the goals are overwhelmingly unachievable
• Designing goals/ rewards/ encouragement is necessary for users to keep going
• Allowing friends’ participation when exercising can be a part of motivation
• Gradually cultivate users’ habit of exercising

Design & Validation

The following is the primary problems I found from the user testing–

1. Homepage

Before

• The information that showed how many steps the seed needs for growing up was not clear.
• To help users cultivate exercise habit, the app should provide daily guidance for stepping.

After

• Add a progress bar to indicate how many steps accumulated in total
• Make it more distinct that how many steps they need to walk daily and separate it from the total steps (growing up requirement) for levelling up to prevent confusion

2. Notification for encouragement

Before:

• One of the participants indicated that he tended to ignore notifications of less importance.

After:

• To get rid of annoying notifications, I add the inbuilt punishment for lost steps if users didn’t achieve daily goal. On the contrast, if users can complete the daily requirements, they will get rewards.

3. Challenge page

Before:

• Users didn’t know that the challenges were group activities.
• Wanted to understand the rule of the competition

After:

• Make the group activities more obvious by adding information about how many people attended the activities and their portraits.
• Add the rule of competition on challenge detail pages.

Final Design

In addition to solving the usability problems and designing the visual style, I also tried to add some micro interactions for my final prototype, which demonstrates how users get achievement, join challenges, follow friends, and share posts.

reflection

This was my first time trying to design for emotional reaction, using characters as guides to assign missions, which was very interesting and made the experience more engaged. I hope next time I could build a story for these characters so that not only the characters could be more vivid but the connection between users would be more compelling. From this project, I also noticed that there are really tons of ways to solve one problem, but we need to consider users’ behavior and their habits in order to seek for the best practice for them. For example, gym memberships may be a financial burden for the target user type I chose, so StepBet that commit users to real money would not be a possible choice. Understanding users as the first step for UX will always be the initiating practice in my future projects.