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Changing a City's Exercise Habits,
One Small Step at a Time

PRODUCT DESIGN . GENERAL ASSEMBLY

Summary

Getup is a gamified exercise app which focuses on encouraging people to walk more and change their exercise habits through the help of their friends and local community. We developed a tier system in which users earn points from group challenges and step goals to level up their animal avatars. The animal avatar tiers relate to specific animals such as tortoise, bunny and fox. This feature allows people to visualise their exercise behaviour and progress while providing extra motivation. There’s also a social aspect, in which users are able to compete with friends and their local community to hold each other accountable.

Getting started...

CHALLENGE

Research from Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation suggested that Melburnians weren’t getting enough exercise. This was a conceptual project and the challenge was to create a solution that ensures the people of Melbourne would take a more proactive approach to their own health and wellbeing and find a way to promote exercise but also increase community resilience.

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ROLE

This was a group project and I worked with two other UX Designers. My roles included project management, UX research, analysis, strategy, ideation, prototyping and testing,

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METHODS

Interviews, business analysis, competitive analysis, systems mapping, user journey mapping, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing

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APPROACH

We focused most of our research on interviews and existing studies on habits and exercise. Through the development of archetypes, we established that the main motivators and constraints of exercise and focused our app on accountability. We then proceeded to prototype and test our ideas

Apple Fitness

  • Visualise your daily summary

  • Set goals

  • Track workouts

  • Connected with Apple Watch

  • Fitness trends

Understanding the problem...

BUSINESS RESEARCH

It’s really important to us that we keep Lord Mayor’s business goals and values while trying to come up with a solution. Some of the goals of LMCF included: being brave, creative, collaborate and relevant to the community. We needed to not just come up with another fitness app on the market, but something really different and innovative. We wanted users to understand how the power of working together can help achieve our goals by including a community aspect. We also understand that LMCF are very passionate about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, so we based our research around the goal of Good Health and Wellbeing.

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MARKET RESEARCH

There’s already a lot of exercise apps out there targeting habits and exercise. The three main apps we looked into were Apple Fitness, Qantas Wellbeing and Streaks. They all had elements of challenges, goals and gamification to motivate their users.

Streaks

  • View daily progress

  • Set daily goals

  • Used a streak system to promote consistency

  • Simple visuals with activity rings

Journey mapping

We then plotted exercise habit behaviour onto a journey map to further understand the user’s feelings, pain points and experience. This map shows a typical user’s journey of habits, from getting started, to maintaining the habit and then seeing results. From our interviews we mapped out how the user might feel during the process and when they are most likely to quit. We mapped out two journeys, (green is for the ideal path and red is for the negative path)

Ideal path: user maintains the habit and sees results which keeps them going but has moments where they struggle or might’ve potentially quit
Negative path: in which the user increased the frequency and difficulty of the habit and ended up quitting

We found that people are most susceptible to quitting when they increased the frequency and difficulty of the habit and when they have to consistently practice it.

Qantas Wellbeing

  • Earn points

  • Challenge and compete with friends

  • Daily and weekly challenges

  • Weekly reports

  • Positive reinforcement

1 Busy Bee

Behaviours: Time-poor, has a strict schedule, and is new to exercise
Goals + Motivations: Start exercising and live a more active lifestyle whilst developing healthy habits
Needs: Something convenient and accessible to work around their busy work schedule, needs help getting started, activities that are not too strenuous and easy to follow.​

2 Fitness Flirt

Behaviours: Constantly quitting new habits, has poor time
management, has a lot of interests and hobbies they tend to start but never finish.
Goals + Motivations: They want to develop new healthy habits that they can maintain, and want to see results because it keeps them going.
Needs: They need to be held accountable, develop small habits that are easy enough for them to achieve in the beginning, and undertake exercises that don't require as much funding.​

Both archetypes would need...

ACCOUNTABILITY

Based on our research and by creating our archetypes, we were able to establish a common theme between them, which is accountability. Accountability can be achieved through multiple ways and it’s not just about holding others accountable, but holding yourself accountable too. Accountability would solve the main constraints of “getting started” and “maintaining their habits” This also helps the archetypes to manage their habits in order to push themselves further and improve their exercise habits in the long-run. We kept in mind this theme of accountability when developing our ideas when we started the sketching and ideation phase.

Sketches and ideation

We started brainstorming and coming up with possible design solutions with a focus on accountability and started exploring different gamification techniques to keep users coming back to develop habits
We decided to focus on walking because it’s the most simple thing we can do and most of us already do this everyday. We also decided to build a mobile app because this allows us to leverage existing technology from a phone’s pedometer Walking is also simple, free, accessible, easy to track and it’s something that everyone can improve on.

Group Challenges

  • Gamified the walking experience by introducing a social aspect
  • Leader board feature so users can compete with their friends and hold each other accountable with weekly challenges which also helps people getting started and maintaining
  • -Example. you can set 6,000 steps for everyday for 2 weeks straight and the aim is to achieve or even surpass the goal.

INSIGHTS FROM INTERVIEWS AND JOURNEY MAPPING

From our research, were gained some valuable insights which we categorised into two main groups. Firstly, there’s the motivators which drives people to consistently exercise and secondly, we have the contraints which holds people back. A main constraint we identified is that people stated they were too time poor and unable to maintain and schedule exercise into their busy schedules. Some interesting motivators we found was that starting with small, easy steps is more effective than overloading and potentially quitting. Our research also suggested that it’s easier for people to gradually increase their difficulty and allows them to be more consistent in the long run. The social aspect definitely motivated users to maintain their exercise habits by keeping each other accountable.

SO, WHO ARE WE DESIGNING FOR?

We created two archetypes to further understand our user's needs and pain points

Animal Avatar Tiers

  • Created an animal tier system 
  • By completing your challenges and maintaining your step goals you can earn points to level up your animal avatar 
  • Everyone starts as a tortoise
  • We decided to use animals that relate to the behaviours of the tier levels eg. tortoise, bunny, fox etc.
  • The goal of this feature is to help people visualise their goals and get people to level up by accumulating more steps.
  • You'll also need to keep up your step goals to maintain your tier status.

User testing & feedback

We did some preliminary testing, feedback was very positive and users seem to be engaged by the competition because the group challenges allowed them to socialise while bringing out their competitive nature in a fun and interactive way. People were entertained by the animal avatars because it allowed them to track and visualise their progress but a few users pointed out logistical issues relating to the leader board and tier system that we needed to refine. Although we got good feedback on the pledge system, it brought up too many complex issues with the app’s core functionality and could be introduced in a later update. From this feedback, we had a clearer understanding of what we’re designing.

The "final" design

Reflection

How did your users respond?

Overall, we received very positive feedback and users were motivated by the animal avatars and group challenges.

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What's next?

In a later update, I would like to incorporate the pledge system into the group challenges, some clothing and accessories for the animal avatars, allow for connection with smart devices such as Fitbit and Apple Watches. Lastly, I want to apply this app model to other exercises and activities such as swimming and cycling.

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What did you learn?

I learnt to focus on one specific problem based on research and further evolve this one problem through design iterations and feedback. I also learnt that it's important to only include the main features of an app which the highest impact to create a minimal viable product

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What would you have done differently?

I would have focused even more on accessibility. Although walking is a very common activity, I should have kept in mind the disabled and injured who may not be able to walk. Some users might feel socially isolated or excluded if their entire social network was able to use this app except them. However, this app model could eventually be developed with a more diverse range of activities to appeal to a larger audience. Also, some users might not know how to use their smart phones.

Want to see more?

Group Pledges

  • Thought about incorporating a pledge system that involved money in the group challenges to provide more motivation.
  • For example, everyone that's competing puts money into a prize pool and then the winner that has the most steps at the end of the challenge takes the money.
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