Teenagers, college students, and professionals all find it hard to fit exercise into their busy schedules. After only a couple of weeks, the motivation to exercise begins to decrease as results remain elusive and other activities take priority. The lack of long-term motivation requires a long-term solution that keeps people engaged and highly motivated. GoalFriends is a mobile application that is designed to tap into this motivation by highlighting the social aspects of exercising and providing an easy way to find new GoalFriends, schedule meetings, and motivate friends to exercise. Our mission is to make exercise both fun and social.
From the contextual inquiries we conducted, we learned more about our target audience and the tasks they performed. On a broad level, four tasks and issues stood out. First of all, data entry is a tedious task that can offer little benefit to the user. Secondly, many of our participants found that they lacked the motivation to continue to exercise on a consistent basis. Third, people’s work and school schedules often get in the way of consistent exercise. Lastly, for people who do not exercise a lot, it is hard to learn new exercises. We will address these common themes and tasks throughout the rest of the essay.
Our application will include three main tasks. It will help users find workouts based on location, activity, or date/time by integrating the user’s calendar. It will allow users to record, view, and share workout videos from friends and the community. Lastly, GoalFriends will enable users to motivate each other by sending motivational messages and media such as songs images etc.
We gained extremely valuable insight about GoalFriends from our low fidelity prototype testing. From participant's feedback, we found two glaring UI problems: the hidden navigation bar and the friend finder mechanism. Additionally, the reaction to our video task was lukewarm. Our participants were visibly delighted by the small feature of being able to send motivational audio clips to friends. Overall, reception to GoalFriends was amazing and we will use the feedback to improve and iterate on our current designs.
Based on our findings from the usability test and discussion in class, we removed the recording and sharing a video feature and split our first task into two separate ones. We ended up with the following tasks:
From the Heuristic Evaluation conducted by our peers, we decided to make the following concrete changes:
For the final prototype, we built an Android application. The design and tasks built upon the previous six weeks of work and the feedback we received from our peers.
Our final poster focused on the design process for GoalFriends over the entire quarter. We relied on images to showcase the different iterations of GoalFriends.
Prasanth is a MSCS student at Stanford University. He has worked on several mobile applications most notably Google Wallet for Android. He previously studied computer science at UCLA. His interests include travel and photography.
Nicole is currently pursuing an MS in Computer Science at Stanford University. Her technical interests include distributed Systems and big data analytis. Her other interests include reading manga and ballroom dancing.
Lakshmi is simultaneously pursuing a dual degree (both B.S. and M.S.) in Management Science and Engineering and a Creative Writing minor at Stanford University. Her interests include designing interfaces, writing stories, and learning Indian Carnatic vocal music.
John is a Computer Science undergraduate at Stanford concentrating on Human Computer Interaction. His interests include eating amazing food, reading history books, and hanging out with friends.