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Fake Out

For this project, my team was tasked with coming up with an engaging fitness tracker app that discourages cheating. We were able to be creative and come up with a unique experience for a specific user group of our choice. After conducting secondary research and learning more about the cheating problem in fitness trackers now, we decided to focus our app on teens and young adults, creating a supportive environment of fitness goals by taking care of pets and keeping them healthy. 

Our Solution: Introducing StepBuddies! Users are encouraged to not cheat in exchange for genuine and rewarding activity. Partnered with an animal avatar that users adopt at the start, users are given tasks to walk, feed, dress, and care for their pet with points they earn from physical activity. At the center of our design is care; both for oneself and for the virtual pet. Users provide mutual support for their pets by bettering themselves. 

See Documentation for the full design process and rationale.

Design Process

Our deliverables for this project were defined in our project brief and included a high-fidelity interactive figma prototype, as well as complete documentation of our process, including desk research, interviews, observations, and prototyping.

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For this project, I mainly focused on the following activities, which I had substantial involvement in and developed my skills in UX Research and UI Design.

Secondary Research

Goals

  •  Understand the current use of step counting apps and learn why people cheat

  • Find out what makes fitness apps enjoyable and motivating

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Insights​

  • Users like competing to keep them motivated, but this creates the desire to cheat to get ahead

  • Patching cheating issues made users bored and unmotivated to continue

  • App needs to be engaging, but not progress based and goal set that encourages cheating

  • Need safeguards from cheating (touchpoints) so that users do not fake their results​

Interviews

Goals

  •  Assess if members of our target audience cheat on fitness apps

  • Learn how users would use an app like the one we are proposing

  • Understand the types of cheating that goes on and what keeps users motivated when using these apps.

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Insights

  • Users only cheat if there is something motivating them to do so

  • Interviewees liked the idea of our platform

  • Thought the animal avatars would motivate them to keep coming back to the app and reaching their step goals​​

Observation

Goals

  • Understand users in a more direct way

  • Discover the routines of gym-goers and what will work well for them based on their current system.

Insights​​

  • Most people are constantly on their phones or listening to music when at the gym

    • Would make it easy for them to use our app when walking or running​

  • Since gym-goers are on their phone normally at the gym, it would seem that they would be open to an entertaining app to keep them focused, motivated, and engaged while working out.

Sketching/Design

  • Based on all of our research, the team began sketching designs for the UI interface including animal avatars that the user can choose from and unlock when playing the game and walking their pets.

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  • Sketches for the app UI, as showcased to the right, were created by me. These wireframes guided our thinking and helped us understand how every screen was going to look in the app. They were created through our insights from our previous activities and guide the user through their experience in the fitness app, keeping in mind all of the cheating prevention elements necessary for a sucessful product.​​

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Final Prototype

Our final design was a high-fidelity figma prototype including all screens necessary for the implementation of the StepBuddies app. I championed this final deliverable, creating all interactivity, variants, and screens, while the other team members helped with the creation of the icons and screen backgrounds for the home, pantry, walking, and shop pages. 

Full figma file available here.

This prototype taught me a lot more about interactivity, as I was a first year UX Design student in my first ever studio. This project taught me about the design process and research that goes into the creation of a hi-fi figma prototype and how to design effectively for a specific user group. Navigating the challenges associated with users cheating on these apps was challenging but very rewarding, and I am pleased with the final prototype in the end!

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