THE BAUHAUS MOUSE
An outline of a UX case study on how fitness trackers or activity trackers as an experience and product could be improved. Contrary to what is noticeable now, UX is separate from UI. What is presented here is a minified UX Case study from my fitness tracker project.
This project was about how fitness trackers or activity trackers as an experience and product could be improved. One of the motivating factors I had for this research design project was that fitness trackers were severely underdeveloped and presented a potential similar to what computers are to us today.
Fitness trackers are known by consumers in the market, but this product has not yet reached a level of acceptance and adoption in health and fitness. The objective was to understand why and if were there areas that I could focus on to widen the scope for exploration.
Surveys were conducted at least three times in the duration of the project. A general survey on health and fitness to assess current attitudes on exercise and views of fitness trackers.
Prior to this project, I was unfamiliar with companies and the various types of fitness trackers. I compiled my analysis with a fresh and eager mind to understand the landscape of the fitness tracker industry by cross-comparison of products and features across different companies. I was able to establish a common thread with fitness trackers.
Ux research and user interviews were vital to bringing clarity to focus areas. At the start of the project with the broad approach I adopted, I had a number of areas I could explore. The insight I gathered pulled me to focus more on the basic interactions of how the software and data curation motivates a user to really form a kind of interaction that would provide a continuous positive loop interaction in long view generated representative data portraits.
I utilized persona for UX research, the first time the construction of the persona was based on a broad set of users who were accessible in my area. There were multiple times in the project I used persona because, with the abundant research materials and iterations, I also had a lot of questions about the type of users and how their goals would differ. At a later stage, I used a fictional character as my persona. Which was a jump point to focus on a persona that was specialized and had more motivation on why a fitness tracker would appeal to these types of users.
Joe, 54 Overweight gamer, decides to use the tracker to motivate his fitness goals and work towards attaining a healthy body
Nadia, 21 Gymnastic champion, her coach recommends her a tracker to actively observe her agility and weight.
The Colonel, 50, a military man has been called back to duties but is out of shape. He uses his tracker to reach his closest physical military record of fitness.
I used aspects of storyboards, but more specifically a short script because I was not able to at first ideate the line of before and after. Writing the experience from a narrative user journey forced me to move from abstraction to see the user progress between states of changes of data narrative and how might the user react.
Since I needed to anchor an expected idea of how I would imagine a potential user, I used a fictional Boxer, Rocky, as my user. The character study is a highly motivated character for physical training, so it was easy to place this persona as a fitness tracker user. Fitness and training as an experience in the becoming, the state and progression where the user is observed in a setting In real life it would be a research facility or through mobile diaries.
These were some of the sketches of a wearable design produced in the early phase of the design stage. During this time, I was also mocking up wireframes for a mobile app. These were later abandoned as my research began to focus on the interaction between the user and visualization.
As I was going in the direction of visualization in communication design and data interpretations, I would sketch out in paper visualization and experiment by coding visualizations.
The testing was not specifically on software, I did have a prototype dashboard, this was not the focus. It was how users would associate with the visualization. The usability was a confirmation of the design decisions made and how potential users would associate.
The final visualization incorporated the best aspects of the previous visualization system that would allow users to read their narrative journey and make necessary adjustments to their activity frequency and intensity.
The focus of the project was quite broad at the start on how the fitness tracker experience could be improved. It led me to a research space to explore and define a better fitness tracker due to the number of sensors, its data processing, and algorithms, or did it have to be a new mobile app or something you wear?
The form is not what makes the experience of fitness trackers usable enough for users, it is how the software allows users to learn more about themselves and take action to shape their health lives. In this case, it was visual encoding and creating a way to manage the data narrative for long-term use.
