Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation: GetUp (Concept Project)
The Foundation acknowledges the critical importance of focusing on health equity – where everyone has an equal opportunity to attain their full health potential – and challenging discriminatory structures and practices to strengthen community resilience and cohesion. Responsibility for bringing this to reality lies not only in ensuring equal access to healthcare, but also making sure that people take a proactive approach to their own wellbeing.
The Brief
The Lord Mayor Charitable Foundation have suggested to us that Melburnians do not get enough exercise. LMCF would like us to create a solution so that Melburnians are being more proactive in their own well-being whilst increasing community resilience.
Our Solution
We noticed that the main solution lies in starting small and easy and keeping users accountable. We created an app called GetUp to gamify the walking experience by including a social aspect with competitive challenges to help people encourage each other. To further aid the gamification process, we added animal avatars that users are able to unlock once they achieve a certain amount of points.
Methods:
Business Analytics
Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Empathy Mapping
Journey Mapping
Archetype Development
System Mapping
Sketching
Wireframing
Team:
3 UX Designers
Tools:
Pen & Paper
Miro
Figma
Duration:
2-week design sprint
Deliverables:
MVP clickable prototype
Research
As there was already plenty of statistics out there for exercise, our research was aimed towards behavioural change. We looked into how people developed and maintained habits and how they measured success.
Business Analysis:
It’s really important to us that we keep Lord Mayor’s business goals and values while trying to come up with a solution. There are a few that we thought the goal resonated with which is brave, creative, collaborative and relevant. We were determined to build something really different and innovative and we wanted users to understand how the power of working together can help achieve our goals by including a community aspect.
What we’re designing should be relevant, impactful and useful to the community.
Competitor Analysis:
We discovered there are already a lot of apps out there targeting habits and exercise, but the 3 main apps that we decided to look into were Apple Fitness, Qantas Wellbeing and Streaks. They all had elements of challenges, goals and gamification to motivate their users which could lead them to develop a habit.
Interviews:
Our team conducted 3 stages of interviews throughout the design process. Interviews were the most effective research to us as we were able to gain some more qualitative insights to back some of the existing exercise statistics. We also really wanted to use these interviews to delve into the heart of the problem and really understand WHY Melburnians weren’t getting enough exercise.
Competitor Analysis
Affinity Mapping the Interviews (click to zoom)
We recognised that there were things that motivated people which is what drives people to consistently do their habits and restraints that held people back. The main motivators was we found was that starting with small, easy steps is more effective than overloading and potentially quitting. The main restraint we found was that people stated they were too time-poor and unable to maintain and fit exercise into their busy schedules.
Journey Mapping
We then plotted exercise habit behaviour into a journey map, to further understand the user’s feelings, pain points and experience. This map shows a typical user’s journey of habits, from getting started, to maintaining the habit and then seeing results. From our interviews, we mapped out how the user might feel during the process and when they are most likely to quit. We found that people are most susceptible to quitting when they increase the frequency and difficulty of the habit and when they have to consistently practice it.
Archetypes
Busy Bee
Behaviours: Time-poor, strict schedule, new to exercise
Goals/motivations: Start exercising and live a more active lifestyle whilst developing healthy habits.
Needs: Needs something convenient and accessible to work around their busy work schedule, activities that are easy to follow and not too strenuous or takes up too much time.
Fitness Flirt
Behaviours: Constantly quitting new habits, has poor time management, has a lot of interests and hobbies,
Goals/motivations: Develop new healthy habits that they can maintain, wants to see results (keeps them going)
Needs: Held accountable, habits that are easy enough for them to achieve at the beginning, exercises that don't require as much funding
Drawing from our insights and archetypes, we established a common theme that would solve some of the problems we encountered with developing habits which is…
ACCOUNTABILITY
This can be achieved in multiple ways, whether it's keeping ourselves accountable or keeping others accountable. This can even be done by leveraging things like notifications and reminders.
Solution
Sketching
We started brainstorming and coming up with possible design solutions with a focus on accountability and started exploring different gamification techniques to keep users coming back to develop habits. We focused on walking because it’s the most simple thing we can do and most of us already do this every day. We also decided to build an app because this allows us to leverage existing technology eg. a phone’s pedometer.
Group Challenges
We gamified the walking experience by introducing a social aspect and a leaderboard so users can compete with their friends and hold each other accountable with weekly challenges eg. you can set 6,000 steps for every day for 2 weeks straight and the aim is to achieve or even surpass the goal.
Animal Avatars
If you complete your challenges and maintain your step goals you can ear points to level up your animal avatar. Everyone starts as a tortoise. We decided to use animals that relate to the behaviours of the tier levels eg. tortoise, bunny, fox etc. the goal of this feature is to help people visualise their goals and get people to level up by accumulating more steps.
Pledge
We thought about incorporating a pledge system that involved money in the group challenges to provide more motivation. For example, everyone that's competing puts money into a prize pool and then the winner that has the most steps at the end of the challenge takes the money.
User Feedback
Engaged by challenges and animal avatars
Enjoyed social and competitive aspects
Logistic issues
Did not understand leaderboard and levelling up
Pledge system
Feedback was very positive and users seem to be engaged by the competition because the group challenges allowed them to socialise while bringing out their competitive nature in a fun and interactive way. However users pointed out logistical issues relating to the leaderboard and tier system that we needed to refine. Although we got good feedback on the pledge system, it brought up too many complex issues with the app’s core functionality and could be introduced in a later update.
Wireframing
Prototype
What’s next?
I would like to incorporate more features for example, the app being able to connect with other smart devices eg. Fitbit and Apple Health, clothing to unlock for the animal avatars and a pledge system that will further gamify the experience. In later updates, I would like the app to be able to count steps into other sports such as cycling and swimming.
What did I learn?
The hardest part for this project was the realisation that we weren’t designing another fitness app. There are many ways people can access exercise these days. Whether it’s going for a jog around the park, putting on a pilates workout video on YouTube or going for a swim in the local pool, there are endless options to choose from. However, how do we get people to do these activities more regularly? How do we invoke this habit to the point where it becomes as common as brushing your teeth in the morning? This research was done by reading up on how people develop habits and understanding the psychology behind habits which we have yet to explore.