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.
WHAT
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.
WHY
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
HOW
My Role
Survey Development, Interviews, Ideation, Design, User Testing
Our Team
Chloe Reshetar-Jost, Patrick Chao, Liam DeCoste, Shravya Kolavara
Course
Information Architecture
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.
KEY FINDING
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.).
The primary interests for working out with others are the ability to motivate each other, and to have someone to correct form and technique
Surveys and interviews helped narrow our target users to ages 20-30; of our survey participants in this age range, 60% have used an app to make friends or find a date
FOCAL AREAS
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
THE DETAILS
ITERATIONS & FEEDBACK
"I don't know how many activities I'm supposed to choose" -P1
"I like that the colors correspond to different things" -P2
"I wish I knew how far away he was so I knew if meeting up was realistic" -P1
"Set up very much like a dating app, I have some confusion regarding the likes" -P3
"The 'Matched with Justin!' page made me think it is like a dating app" -P5
"What happens if I don't want to connect with someone ever? [...] there's no way for me to say no" -P7
"What if someone messaged me stuff I wasn't comfortable with? Could I report them?" -P6
3 rounds of testing
10 participants
18-30 years old
8 tasks
UserTesting.com & In-Person
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
LOOKING BACK
LOOKING AHEAD
Because we were focusing on the MVP for this project, we were unable to tackle more complex features since we wanted to focus on a solid foundation and IA. However, our research and user testing pointed to a number of areas that would be beneficial for us to iterate on if we wanted to move our product to market.