LeaderFit
Responsive Website
A novel platform harnessing online communities to enhance exercise accountability, cultivating a community focused on constructive competition.
tREDD SMITH
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Our goal was to learn about better understand peoples’ fitness habits in conjunction with motivation. We aimed to discover how social interactions, whether online through communities or with peers, influenced motivation and pushed goals.
Through user interviews we learned that people are motivated by their social circles and are more accountable when their peers know about their workouts. Having a consistent exercise routine is essential for people’s overall health, but consistency can be difficult!
We designed, then tested, a solution that provides people a way of tracking their workout consistency in comparison to their peers, all in one responsive website.
My Role: UX Design Lead & UX Researcher
Team Size: 3 people
Duration: 2 weeks
Project Status: Complete | December 2023
Tools Used: Figma, FigJam, Keynote, Google Surveys, Notion, Zoom
Methods Used: Business Model Canvas, Screener Survey, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Persona, Journey Map, Feature Prioritization, Sketching & Design Studio, Style Guide, Wireframing, Prototyping, & Usability Testing
Problem Space
Individuals whom wish to live a healthy lifestyle struggle with life and work responsibilities that derail their fitness goals. Lack of consistency leads to decreased motivation and exercise. Accountability from friends and family or online communities can re-engage individuals to prioritize fitness back into their lives.
Our Challenge
We hypothesized that individuals who have inconsistent exercise habits crave a tool that helps them stay motivated towards their fitness journey.
How might we use online communities to provide a habitual source of motivation that increases fitness consistency?
View Prototype
Desktop Prototype
Our Solution
LeaderFit is a platform for mobile and desktop views. The purpose is to utilize online communities to enhance accountability, cultivating a community focused on constructive competition, ultimately aiming to improve users' fitness and overall well-being.
The solution contains features that allow users to:
Digitally log their workouts by activity and duration
Tracks their workout streaks and workout details
Add friends to view their activity
Create or join existing groups and view group leaderboards
“Nudge” a friend that has not worked out and “Congratulate” the ones that have
Our Process
My team and I were able to create an exercise activity tracker that makes fitness fun and solves people’s biggest motivational needs.
Here is the process we implemented to get there:
We Started With What We Believed
Based on initial business research and what we knew of people’s general fitness patterns, we hypothesized that individuals who have inconsistent exercise habits crave a tool that helps them stay motivated towards their fitness journey.
How might we use online communities to provide a habitual source of motivation that increases exercise consistency?
This led us to wonder,
A virtual fitness community can be motivating
Tracking workout milestones makes people more likely to continue working out
People who see their friends/peers working out are more likely to workout themselves
People are more likely to stay on track with their workouts if their friends can see if they have or have not for a particular day
People are more likely to workout if they are already on a workout streak
People would like to be able to join groups and see the workout data of others performing similar activities as them
Our assumptions included:
Research
Synthesize
Ideate
Deliver
Synthesizing What We Heard
We synthesized the qualitative data that we collected from user interviews and identified trends through affinity mapping. By refining and renaming the groupings, insights emerged.
What We Set Out To Validate
The research team decided to explore the problem space in more detail to find out about the significance of being in a workout community, and the conveniences and pain-points associated with maintaing a consistent exercise routine.
Validating Our Beliefs
To substantiate our assumptions, we conducted user research by interviewing 5 people within our target audience (people who exercise 1 to 4 times per week) to find out about people’s exercise habits and what motivates them.
USER RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
Key Insights:
What We Heard From Users
People are motivated by their social circles
People practice a variety of exercise forms
People are more accountable when their peers know about their workouts
People are motivated by their own consistency
Who We Are Designing For
Based on the trends and insights that emerged from user interviews, a persona was created to humanize the data and focus in on our target audience for the upcoming design process.
Riley embodies the overall user base that we examined. His goals, needs, and frustrations are indicative of what our target audience has shown us.
Design Studio: Sketching & Concepting
We took the core insights that emerged from research to the design process. We first listed out features that would be the most valuable for our client and the target audience. Using two UX methods - a feature prioritization matrix and a MuShCoWo framework, we distilled our ideas down to the most critical ones for the MVP of the app.
With the features solidified, the design process kicked off with low-fidelity sketches in a collaborative design studio. This process helped the team quickly visualize core features in different ways, and we then converged on the best ones from each team-members pitch.
How It Performed
After modifying the design based on feedback from the first round of testing, we ran another round of usability testing with 5 new participants using the hi-fidelity prototype. We compared the results from both tests and calculated the deltas. It's data has proven that our latest iteration of the app can be used easily and intuitively.
What Changed (Mid-Fidelity → Hi-Fidelity)
In order to see if our product was intuitive to users, we went through two rounds of usability testing, with a total of 10 people. We gathered feedback on the mid-fidelity designs with the first 5 people, and then made revisions to address problem areas for our hi-fidelity prototype. By conducting more testing with 5 new users, we were able to see how our modifications performed between iterations.
DESIGN
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
We then elaborated upon the sketches that worked best by digitizing them as mid-fidelity wireframes.
Key Takeaways:
Task 1, recording a cycling workout, had slightly negative deltas across the board. From mid to hi-fidelity, we added more functionality/steps surrounding adding a workout. This includes two drop-downs (selecting the activity and duration) and uploading the picture. We believe this is the reason for the uptick in time taken for the user.
Both tasks 2 and 3 experienced positive bumps in deltas. We used the takeaways from the first round of usability testing and applied the feedback into changes made for the hi-fidelity prototype.
There was 0 misclicks throughout all three tasks, indicating that the design is intuitive for users who have no experience using it.
Here are some key areas we improved from mid to high fidelity:
Hi Fidelity Wireframes
Our Prototype
Click around the prototype here
What’s Next for Paw Prints?
In creating the MVP for of our concept project in just two weeks, we had to prioritize the most important features that make the LeaderFit platform what it is at its core. Along the way, our team determined some opportunities for the next iteration of the platform:
Recommendations & Next Steps
We only ran usability testing on the mobile web version of the website. So for the next steps we would run testing on the desktop view as well.
Using the feedback gathered from the first round of testing on the desktop view, we would gather insights for potential design improvements, implement those recommended design changes, and finally re-run usability testing to validate.
Reflection
This project is one that I have thought about for a long time. For years I have been creating a shared note on the iPhone Notes app, listing out 100 days in a row of dates, and sending it around to my friends and family. We made a key at the top of the page and everyone assigned themselves an emoji of their choosing. On each day, after the person completed their workout, they would mark their emoji on the current date. I called it the “100 day challenge”, and the idea was to get any type of exercise in for at least an hour per day for 100 consecutive days. I learned first hand from my peers that having something as silly and simple as this note made them feel more accountable and made them workout more consistently. So the inspiration for this project started with an idea as simple as that, and my team and I flushed it out further.
As someone who enjoys daily exercise for my overall well-being, I have personally experienced the occasional lack of motivation to get a workout in. By bouncing questions off of interviewees it has appeared that many other people can occasionally lack motivation, and they too feel motivated and more accountable when their social circle is involved in their fitness journey.
This project was a fun way of digging deeper into solutions for combating people’s exercise inconsistency, learning the role that socialization plays in people’s desires to workout, and for finding innovative ways of making the overall exercise experience better for people.
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Paw Prints
All of your pets’ medical information, in one organized place for ease of mind and transferability, for wherever life takes you and your furry family members.
