Keeping up with a fitness routine can be mundane when there is little to differentiate from the previous day's routine, which is doing the same amount of reps at the same place as the gym. There is only one motivation to exercise besides keeping their body fit and healthy.
GOBA is a fitness app that helps users maintain their fitness by exploring the outdoors with a virtual companionship to provide encouragement and support. This app is great for casual users who need to go out more and need help staying fit!
I collaborated with another designer to create questions and conduct user interviews. After collecting information from our interviews, we worked together to create the empathy map, user persona, user journey map, and branding for the GOBA app. We decided to split the work where my teammate worked on the watch device’s user flow and prototype while I worked on the mobile’s user flow and prototype and coding the landing page for the app.
We established goals to learn more about users' fitness routines and their thoughts about working out with a companion. We also wanted to understand how users utilize their mobile and watch devices.
These are the three research questions:
Our seven interviews taught us enjoyable feelings and attitudes about exercise and being fit. Most people enjoy being competitive when working out, such as comparing their fitness statistics with friends and family. Some enjoy receiving digital badges and achievement awards when apps include those features.
People also value measuring their exercise performance by checking their time, distance, and heart rate. The Apple Watch users mention completing their Health rings on their Watch, which notify users of how many steps they need to complete left.
Also, some people enjoy exploring new areas while they exercise outdoors. Some worked out in gyms, and they felt that driving to the same place and doing the same reps was too repetitive, so they were open to exploring new places while exercising.
Emily is a retail manager and likes keeping a good fitness routine despite her busy work schedule. However, she doesn't want to keep her monotonous routine of going to the same gym daily and doing the same workout. Emily knows there are unexplored scenic areas in the city's park but needs help to search the trails on maps easily. Also, she wants to track her routine and have some friendly competition with friends or people in her area. Sometimes she wishes she had someone to work out alongside her.
People like Emily tend to lose motivation to exercise because it's boring and repetitive. To help Emily maintain her motivation, we will create an app that makes achieving her goals fun with companionship and rewards while enjoying the outdoors.
After brainstorming ideas and organizing them into a feature prioritization matrix, my teammate and I choose the most viable solutions to suit Emily's needs.
We checked different apps with fitness features, rewards systems for completing exercise routines, and virtual companionship. Two apps, Alltrails and Wokamon, stood out to us, so we compared features and looked for opportunities to improve the experience.
Alltrails is an outdoor activity-tracking app that provides information about the trails in an area, and users can sync the map for offline use. Although the app is great for users who want to explore new places, it is straightforward and utilitarian in design, and there is only one incentive to keep using the app if the user feels they need to explore a new trail.
Wokamon is a pedometer game app where users are rewarded with digital currency for their steps and use it to upgrade the virtual pet. This app is excellent for people who want to move around more and get rewarded for it. However, the app is not great at relying on an honor system since users can bypass the pedometer by shaking their phones and still have "steps" recorded in the app.
Emily is losing motivation to exercise since it's getting repetitive. She discovers the GOBA fitness app, motivating her to explore new areas around her and be rewarded for achieving her exercise.
Emily is a first-time user who goes through the onboarding process and selects a virtual companion. After going through the onboarding process, she chooses a trail and syncs the map on her smartwatch. She records her activity once she's on the path.
To express the fun and friendliness of the GOBA fitness app, we chose a vibrant green as our primary color, with purple and yellow to complement it. Since virtual companionship is one of our main features for this app, the icon for the logo is the GOBA creature and our mascot for this app.
My teammate and I individually sketched out mobile and watch screens for similar features for the GOBA app. After uploading the sketches on Invision, we had several people do an A/B test and provide feedback on features in our sketches. We gathered and discussed the comments from testing and implemented features users liked into our final prototypes.
We also created wireframes on Figma for what we designed on our paper prototype. The wireframes helped us lay out the design for our high-fidelity prototype.
To create our high-fidelity prototypes, we use Figma to design and showcase the interactions on the app. My teammate worked on prototyping the watch design, and we both worked on prototyping the mobile design. We collaborated to give feedback and improve our designs.
For new users, the GOBA fitness app has onboarding screens to give them an overview of what the app does and have them choose a companion from a list of 12 characters. Users also input their location so the app can recommend trails around their area.
Once the user lands on the front page, the GOBA app will list several trails around their area. Several features are listed on the preview image, such as the number of points they can collect while experiencing the trails, the different activities they can do on their course, such as hiking or biking, and the level of difficulty of the route.
Selecting a trail will lead the user to the trail's description page, which shows the features listed on the explore page and more information about the route, such as their distance, location, and user reviews on their trail. A button is also on the bottom to sync the path on their Watch.
After syncing the location on their Watch, the user can go to the starting location of the trail and press start on their Watch so they can record time and distance without carrying their phone. The GOBA companion will notify the user for every quarter distance used based on their location on the trail and encourage them to keep up the routine. The user can choose to stop anytime along the route, and the app will calculate the number of gems they collected based on the distance they completed.
My teammate and I collaborated on the layout and content for the GOBA app landing page. We used Figma to create a wireframe, and I used Bootstrap to code the site while my teammate helped with the content, such as images and copy.
For the next iteration of our app, we want to create a landing page dedicated to the customization of the virtual companion, which will sync to the mobile app. We also want to expand collaboration by adding a gift-giving feature where friends can drop gifts along exercise routes for users to collect. The app will also have a battle feature so users can have friendly competition against their friends and beat their stats.
The biggest challenge in designing the app is determining the features to add to our Apple Watch prototype. Initially, we wanted to do a multi-modal app where users can sync their smartwatch with the mobile app. Although my teammate, Bonita, and I had used fitness smartwatches before, figuring out the features to add to the Apple Watch was an obstacle since we needed to gain experience interacting with the device. We had to rely on interviews with Apple Watch users and online research to determine the design for our GOBA app. For future research, we want to find more smartwatch users to test our watch app.
Check out the landing page for the GOBA fitness app and explore the mobile and Apple Watch prototypes.
©2023 Michelle Lam