After the outbreak of COVID-19, home fitness has become the choice of many people. Facing the sudden epidemic situation, many people realize the importance of health and immunity. However, they find it difficult to establish a fitness habbit at home.
We encourage beginners to grow together by building a fitness community with personalized plan. Users can remind each other and workout together in different places and even at different times.
UX Researcher, UX Designer
June 2020 - Dec. 2020
Passion Work
Individual Work
Figma, Balsamiq, Whimsical, Adobe Creative Suite
After the outbreak of COVID-19, home fitness has become the choice of many people. Facing the sudden epidemic situation, many people realize the importance of health and immunity. The popularity of home-based fitness also reminds people that as long as you want to, any place is a playground, and any place is a gym.
Based on my primary and secondary research, I focused on helping beginners cultivate their workout habit and improve their experience of home fitness.
To find out what facts change in home fitness, I conducted a literature review and a competitive analysis. I found out that people keep fit at home in many ways and their choices in different media deeply influence their workout methods. In China's market, there are many existing and emerging products for home fitness. The existing and emerging solutions various from media such as video platform, live broadcast, fitness software and motion sensing game.
For the competitive analysis, I focused on fitness products for the general population in the home environment.
For such a spatial movement, home fitness, current solutions have their own limitations, whether it is the interaction between people and devices or the link between people themselves. As a student, with limited time and resources I have, it is hard to solve all the problem.
With the additional input and feedback from our clients, I narrowed down our scope to video platform. because of its biggest user base, From my research, the video platform has the most potential and oppotunities of improvement. In addition, I could maximize the marketing impact on this problem because of its biggest user base, abundant video resources and growing uploader group.
I then conducted semi-structured interviews with 8 people who keep workout at home with their own methods during the epidemic.
I created an affinity map as a group to identify themes from our qualitative interview data.
Consistent with our domain research, we decided to focus on helping fitness beginners because they need guildance most to overcome obstacles in cultivating home fitness habits. It is also critical for novices and those who gave up halfway to establish confidence and passion in fitness.
Therefore, we eventually focused our research on improving beginners' workout experience and help them stick on their plan.
In order to eliminate the interference of usability problems among the existing imperfect home fitness products, I also interviewed the users of different online products and gym fitness to get a common journey map.
"I'm very energetic outside. However, I always sit or lie down at home. When I tend to workout occasionally, I feel wierd that I can't get it started in my living room！"
Both mental and physical preparation is essential before the workout. Compared to getting dressed and going to the gym, users have to adjust their mindset to start their workout at home differently.
It is not an equally weighted choice-making process. Starting work on at home requires more efforts.
"It's hard to find online teaching that suits my rhythm. At the very beginning, I asked my boyfriend to make a teaching plan for me because he knows me better, and I just followed it at the beginning. Later, I found my rhythm."
Beginners can not find their fitness rhythm at the beginning. They can not plan for themselves but try to make mistakes or follow others' plans. At this time, his plan doesn't synchronize his fitness rhythm well. The gaps between cause frustration, confusion, and disorientation.
However, in continuous trial and error, novices can gradually adapt to their own rhythm by improving and executing their plans through constructive feedback. This is the time-consuming progress of how novices grow into veterans.
It is easier to improve themselves for novices who mentally set up for such a process and gradually reduce gaps through feedback.
Based on the evidence I collected from user research, I conducted an informed brainstorming session. Eventually, I narrowed my ideas down to the following four large themes that address our users’ concerns from different perspectives.
My first concept leverages push notifications to encourage users to start fitness activities in their spare time. To facilitate the decision-making process, I use the simple mini-step, setting up a fitness environment, as a switch between leisure mode and fitness mode.
Concept 2 helps beginners to find their fitness rhythm. Facing the vast amount of fitness videos, beginners feel challenged to make decisions and plan on their own. With the user's input, the system can generate a personalized fitness plan for the user. We made a personalized daily plan for users and recommended popular plans that meet their needs.
My third concept provides an immersive environment for the learning community. Users feel less bored and frustrated when they have company. Leaving and hearing bullet comments with voice can encourage users to participate in the community and record their progress.
My fourth concept provides users an online fitness room to work out with friends together. Users can invite partners to their rooms. They can see, chat with and encourage each other while working out with friends. The public room also provides users the opportunity to meet new friends in fitness.
Concept 5 aims at improving users' feedback and sense of achievement when they finished their plan. According to heart rate and SpO2 detecting devices, we can adjust the duration and difficulty of each action according to the data to make the plan more suitable for them. Also, uses can share their plan and daily attendance with friends.
After gathering feedback from 10 users, we decided to proceed with building workout community form Concept 3 and 4 as our core concept, and incorporate the personalized plan recommendation feature from Concept 2 into our final design. Further, we redesigned the Concept 1 to a mutual supervision mechanism between friends in the workout community.
We also derived several design implications from participants' feedback. Here are some examples:
With the design implications, we brainstormed the information architecture of the application and came up with the following information architecture design:
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We use smart widgets with different statesas a messaging board among users to remind and encourage each other. The widget shows who is working on today's training program and invites users to join it.
When users complete their plan, they can remind their friends to start today's training. Their friends will receive the reminder via the widget.
Instead of system notification, we visualizefriends' invitation by widgets with an avatar to make it less intrusive andmore appealing.
We provide beginners with popular plan recommendations and intelligently generated daily plans for different areas based on user input. We recommend plans with reference to the difficulty users need and their favorite uploadersand teaching style to help users discover coaches and fitness mode that suit them.
We encourage users to create their own plans. On the plan page users can click on the videos to see the actions included and add, delete, and replace videos to make the plan more suitable for them. At the same time, advanced users can iterate the plan to adapt to their growth and share it with others
To create a more immersive fitness environment for single mode, we introduce bullet comments with voice to accompany users By joining a learning community made up of bullet comments. Users can hear other people's voices and share their feelings via voice to encourage each other.
Messages from others provide constant updates to the unchanging instructional videos, making it less likely that users will get bored and distracted by at home environment.
During the breaks between videos, we expand the capacity of bullet comments. We encourage users to feel, record and share their physical feelings and progress. Those who watch the same video can continually observe the growth of all users and be inspired.
Because it is difficult for users to reach and operate the device during the workout, we provide voice interaction for actions during the workout, including sending bullet comments and adjusting videos.
Fitness Party is a multiplayer mode fitness activity. Users can invite their friends to turn on the cemera and join the party with a avatar. They can have a good time with best friends, chating, exercising, and encouraging each other.
The party holder can make a plan for everyone and set it up as a routine. Users can also make their rooms public to make new friends.