Background

This project began from my observations on people's workout habit changes after Covid. One key reason for people to work out is the social factor, whether it is meeting new people, engaging with a group of friends, or having a better body image in front of others. Covid has distanced everyone and made the workout experience more silo and less motivated. I thought how can we help people stay motivated and still feel like they can work out with friends and have social moments?

Overview

UniFit is a mobile fitness and social app that allows users to find flexible workout programs and personalize workouts based on their needs, workout with friends and get real-time visualized data and progress. Under the It creates new possibilities for enhanced social interaction, as it allows users to workout with each other simultaneously or at different times and check out their real-time data, even when they are physically apart from each other.

Challenge

How to get people more physically activated during self-isolation?

Major reasons why young office workers tend to lose motivation to workout are as follows:

Solution

An online fitness community for busy professionals who live alone

The problems would be solved by creating an app that includes social function to connect users with friends and community with a series of game mechanics to motivate users, as well as personalized options and visualized data for users to be more autonomous during workouts.

Brainstorming

What are the main topics that are associated with fitness and health?

I started by conducting brainstorming sessions (including card sorting and mind mapping) to gather different aspects and ideas about fitness and workouts and then organized and condensed them into several categories. I use these brainstorming methodologies to better understand people’s current behavior in fitness and social media.

Key Research Takeaways

Research Synthesis

Personas

To better understand users' needs, experiences, pain points, I wrapped up the user research with the creation of user personas. These personas are used as a design reference moving to the ideation phase.

Empathy Map

I first wrote down some key quotes I gathered from the user interview and I used an Empathy Map to divide the research data based on what the user said, did, thought, and felt. During this exercise, I focused on looking for activities the user might do or desires they might have and contradictions in user attributes and asking why this discrepancy exists. This session allows me to synthesize user needs and insights to define a more clearer design challenge.

Workflow

3 Scenarios

To follow my ideation process, I conducted several exercises to examine emerging patterns and groupings of functionalities around workouts. Based on my previous research insights, I realize that the ideas around workout habits differ by people’s time constraints and personalities and what they care about the most. I clustered them into the following 3 different user scenarios.

Design Goal

Target Audience:

White-collar professionals at age 25 - 35

Reframe the Design Question:

How might we make workouts more efficient and pleasant for people and show them their progress to motivate them?

Concept Refinement

WeFit Key Features

The final concept, WeFit is a social and fitness app. it focuses on enhancing social interactions among users and motivating users when they workout with others. Users could also get real-time data to see how they are doing.

Design Principles

After the research and user interviews, I summarized 3 takeaways.

Key User Flow 1:

Preview workout and customize workout based on individual goals

Homepage

Before and After

Usability testing key finding: Users have trouble identifying key information on the home page because The cards workouts are equally distributed

Key User Flow 2:

Start workout with partner & Check result

When User and partner workout at separate times

Workout Page

Before and After

Usability testing key finding: Users want to compare and contrast their workout data but also be able to focus on the training video

Solution: prioritize training video by changing info proportions

Progress Page

Before and After

Usability testing key finding: Users want to compare and contrast their workout data but also be able to focus on the training video

Key User Flow 3:

Find peers, Join & Engage in Community events

Leaderboard Page

My assumption vs. What users want

Design System

I came up with a design style guide to help me develop high-fidelity design. To make users feel more energetic and enthusiastic, I utilized a bright orange as the main color to create a healthy and a minimalistic design to create a welcoming vibe for the product.