Fake Out!

For this project, my team was tasked with modifying or creating a new fitness tracking app that will prevent users from cheating and logging steps they did not actually take.

Role: UX Designer, Research Lead

Timeline: Early through Mid April, 2023

Class: Learning Studio 1 (CGT 17208)

In learning studios we learn tools and methods, then apply those skills through 1-2 month group projects and short exercises. Learning studio 1 is taken by all CGT majors creating multi-disciplinary project groups.

Defining our scope

Project Brief

The goal of this project was to create a fitness app that would encourage users to track their steps, while preventing them from cheating and logging steps they did not take.

Background Research

To define our scope and users in this project space, my group started the project with background research. We looked at articles trying to help people increase their daily step count and work out more often. We noticed that many of these articles were targeted at middle aged office workers, and that a lot of online conversations about increasing health through higher step counts also focused on this group.

Articles were focused on goal setting and working with your daily schedule to improve step counts realistically.

Because middle aged office workers seemed to be the most interested in increasing their health through increasing their step count, we decided we would focus on them as our user group.

Interviews

We conducted interviews with members of this age group to learn more about the ways people think about, and approach starting and maintaining exercise routines.

The table to the right shows the insights we got from these interviews.

We found that people within our user group needed a system that would motivate them to get more steps throughout the day while making sure the process doesn't seem overly complicated or intimidating

Existing Experience

Now that we had a user group, and some foundational research on how this group approaches exercise and exercise maintenance, we decided to look at what systems and apps there were to facilitate health-related behavioral change to understand what works and what doesn't.

Leaderboards and Gamification

We found that many apps use leaderboards, either among friends or on a platform wide basis, to encourage competition among users which is meant to keep them engaged. Apple fitness, iFit, and other fitness apps used this feature.

We found through our research that while this method works very well for some, it tends to discourage or frustrate others and keep them from using the app. If a person doesn't have a high level of self-efficacy, the belief that they can accomplish a goal, they are unlikely to be inspired by competition.

Because our interviewees didn't tend to feel confident about exercising if they weren't experienced with it, we decided not to use a leaderboard or gamified system

Behavioral Change

Throughout our research we learned about different methods of behavioral change. One theory that kept being brought up was the transtheoretical model of behavioral change, a system that defines stages of a behavioral change, and suggests activities and methods that can be implemented at these different stages to move someone from pre-contemplation, when they have no intention to change a behavior, to maintenance where they aren't making changes to their routines anymore and are working to maintain the changed behavior.

Our main source for an existing service that included behavioral change methods was the weight loss app Noom. This service uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to change how it's users think about their eating habits. We thought that Noom's method of giving lessons to introduce information to users was useful and aligned with some of our background research including the methods suggested in the transtheoretical model.

As choosing to start exercising is requires a significant behavioral change, we decided to model that aspect of our app after the transtheoretical model, using different methods based on the part of the process a user is in

Progress Monitoring

Many fitness tracker's main function is progress monitoring. Almost all of the existing services that we looked into used progress monitoring in some way. We learned that using negative reinforcement as a way to monitor progress (or rather lack thereof) was discouraging to users. We learned that things like long term graphs with frequently taken data was motivating to our target group, especially compared with services that took less frequent measurements of data.

We decided that our service would use progress monitoring as a main feature, but we would try to remove as much negative reinforcement or guilt as we could, and that we would use daily measurements of success rather than weekly measurements

Our Design

Taking all of this research into account we put together an app that would motivate users to increase their daily step count by using the transtheoretical model's steps for behavioral change, as well as progress monitoring features that would highlight positive progress but avoid negative reinforcement.

Final Design: Mind Over muscle

Coach and Lessons

The coach on our app is customizable and run by AI, and will teach users their lessons. A customizable coach means that users can pick how they want their coach to act, and have an element of personalization on the app.

Lessons are the main focus of our app. Based on the strategies presented in the transtheoretical model, they are meant to make users think through and visualize their goals, as well as to give them suggestions that will help them integrate regularly meeting a step goal into their lives. Lessons are tailored to users based on which stage of the transtheoretical model the are in. Below are some examples of lessons we created for each strategy in the transtheoretical model.

Step tracker, Weekly Graph, & Upcoming Milestones

The step tracker, weekly graph, and upcoming milestones were all ways we implemented progress tracking.

We included the Step tracker as an easy way for users to see how many steps they have gotten so far that day with a graphic that shows how close they are to meeting their step goal for the day.

The Weekly Graph shows how a users steps have been trending. This is where a user can see if they are improving, maintaining a steady goal, or aren't taking as many steps.

Milestones keep users informed of any big steps in their progress that are coming up. In our design, milestones aren't badges or anything to collect, they are intended to show users how much progress they've made or bigger goals they are close to reaching.

Daily Agenda

The daily agenda is meant to be a tool to help busy people find time in their day to walk. A user can import their schedule from a separate calendar app and schedule time to walk with that agenda in mind. The app will send users a reminder when it is a time that a user has scheduled to walk. This feature helps users create and maintain daily walking goals by creating a realistic schedule that can be easily followed.

Calendar

The calendar serves two purposes. It serves as the way to navigate to different daily schedules and it helps track goal fulfillment. The gradient on each day shows how much of their set goal a user completed. A fully blue square means that the user met their goal for the day while a darker-blue square means that a user only met part of their goal for the day. White squares are rest days.

Rather than force users to consider every day a day they need to put in effort, we decided to encourage users to take rest days when they need them. A rest day allows users to have an out if they don't think that their schedule or their plans will allow them to meet their goals that day. Instead of seeing a dark square on their calendar that might induce guilt or feelings of failure, a user can see that they purposefully took a day off.

Emaline Frey

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