Active: Fitness Together

Active is a platform that facilitates people coming together to exercise. The application connects people using 1-on-1 meetups to help build friendships through exercise. It introduces people who have similar interests when it comes to staying active.

It aims to reduce the barrier between thinking about exercising and actually exercising. Having a workout partner is known to help people stay motivated. Active is a means to improve mental and physical health within a community.

Emphasize activity and experience level on profiles so users can easily find others with the same skillsets. Set filters such as area boundaries, age range, and mutual friends to help find the right partner

Helping users find exercise partners differentiates Active from other competitors

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

We were mainly interested in who the application was catering to, what they were offering, and what kind of data it was collecting. This led us to three main findings:

1. Age, height, and weight are the most basic information that all exercise applications collect

2. Nearly half of the applications want to know users' activity levels

3. Less of the applications try to pair exercise partners

Only one existing application tried to pair exercise partners by providing a group activity feature - building a platform to help people find training partners seemed to be our opportunity.

SURVEY AND INTERVIEW ANALYSIS

Further understanding of how people use online dating and friendship applications was a key part of our research. We determined that users aged 20-30 years old would be our main audience. As far as exercise tendencies, we noticed in responses from our interviews that the current activity dynamic that users participated in (solo vs. group) seemed to depend on the type of activity (climbing, running, weight lifting, etc.).

RESULTING CORE FEATURES

The design of our product should be fun and energetic to get users excited about exercising

FINDING VISUAL DESIGN INSPIRATION

STYLE TILE

Our style tile helped guide our design, making sure that our uses of font, color, and overall feel were consistent. While this style title does not comprehensively provide all the information that would be needed to design our application, it is an informative jumping off point that can be used in conjunction with some more specifications to help design the app. 

Three rounds of user testing moved our design from 'dating app' to 'exercise and friendship app'

INITIAL WIREFRAMES

We utilized a grid-style interface so that our users can view all potential workout partner “matches” within a set distance. The potential partners will be ordered so that users who share more preferences will be placed closer to the top of the grid. Users should be able to see all their potential “matches” on the same page and should not be limited by the card-style interface that is utilized by dating applications such as Tinder and Bumble.

USER TESTING AS WE MOVED TOWARD HI-FI DESIGNS

ITERATIONS & FEEDBACK

The MVP focuses on the core feature of Active - connecting based on activity and experience level

SELECTED HI-FI MOCKUPS

Personal Profile

Onboarding

Connect & Filter

Connection Requests & Messaging

SYSTEM CONTENT BLUEPRINT

FULL PROTOTYPE WALKTHROUGH 

Still want more? Check out our full report here!

Communication throughout the entire process allowed us to create a "functional" and cohesive MVP

LESSONS LEARNED

Because we worked on each piece of the project as a team early on, rather than dividing the work, our team was able to share an understanding of the ultimate goals of the app and build a more cohesive functionality and design at each step in the process, even when we could not meet in person.

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Taking the time to parse through survey data helped us to establish our target users, and informed the key features that were essential for us to include in our application.

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Once we got started, we realized that not all research and design approaches are necessary for every project. For example, going through our survey and interview data and grouping key points on a whiteboard was more effective for us than a formal Work Affinity Diagram would have been.

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Throughout this project, we learned that beginning user testing early on in the design process is essential to get an idea of what needs reworking - this helped us identify issues in our navigation before we spent more time designing them in a way that was unsuccessful.