Buddies

This was short-term project aiming to design an application to support people to engage and maintain healthy levels of activity and feel good about themselves.

Buddies is an application that set up a daily work-out schedule for all levels of users and supply detailed tutorials to guild users work-out properly. Additionally, users can correct their movement by the motion tracking which records a user's movement and analyse it. For social aspect, Users will be assigned a group as they access to Buddies. Group challenges present occasionally. When all group members complete the challenge (on their own) they will get points which can be exchange training courses. Through the group task, users will gain the sense of achievement and belonging and committed to do exercise.

Individual Project
Role: UI & UX Design

Design Process

Due to the time limited, I spent two days on research and problem definition then moved rapidly to a paper prototyping. Through user testing, I modified and improved the application whether in interface or founction aspects.

Initial Thoughts

We all know exercise has a lot of benefits for us but why do some people not exercise. Take me for example, I did exercise regularly when I was in my hometown Taipei. I played basketball with my friends twice a week and went surfing on the weekend. After I moved to Dublin I have no friends playing basketball with me and not to mention having a car and surfboard to go surfing. I started to work out in gym but did not know where to begin and even got injuries because of doing work out wrongly and therefore I became lazy and feel unmotivated for doing exercise.

Research & Define problem

During the research I found that the reason for those who do not exercise is because that they are lack of motivation. And it can boil down to some reason - they view exercise as difficult, exercise is pointless or not having a type of sporty people around, and etc.

After interviewing with people, I sorted out two potential solutions that can help people to build the motivation for exercise. Firstly, teaching people to do exercise corretly and giving them a structured training plan. Good form ensures workout efficiency and reduces the likelihood of injury. As long as doing exercise properly and regularly they will see a significant improvement on themself and it encourages them to keep doing so. Secondly, work out as a group can build a commitment for exercise. research has found that people are more likely to lose weight if their exercise buddy is losing weight.

How might we make exercise more accessible and committed

Ideation

In my previous work-out experience, I was a totally newbie and I did not know where to start and how to do it in the right way. Even though I watched some tutorials on youtube, I still was not sure whether doing it correctly or not. Furthermore, having no friends work-out together, I got bored quickly and felt less motivation to keep doing it.

Therefore, I wanted to design an application that assists people work out efficiently and correctly and then get a better result. In addition, allowing users work out with others via the application in order to encourage with each other and establish the cohesion in a group and stick to doing exercise.

Prototype & Usability testing

Paper Prototype

Mid-Fi Prototype

The flow shown a user will receive three tasks for each day and a content of tasks will get more difficult as time goes on. Furthermore, a group task presents on user task list occasionally, user and their group members have to complete it.

Testing & Feedback

Some of users metioned that a group challenge is a good thing for socializing but they wanted to focus on their self-training more therefore I balanced the proportion of self tasks to group one.
Added the motion tracking feature, User are able to review their body position after finishing a round.
Removed vague features. (ex. User have to use points to gain further tasks)

Microinteraction

When users complete tasks they can save them to the achievement section, in order to check and adjust their workout plan. The animation of saving mimics the action of putting files into a document wardrobe. This makes users delighted and gain a sense of achievement when they complete tasks.