As a part of the General Assembly UX Design Course, I worked on this solo conceptual project under the instruction of UX Design professional Henry Truong.
FitLife is a health + fitness lifestyle mobile app that helps young adults organize and maintain a healthy lifestyle routine, as well as connect with other individuals to build their own supportive fitness community.
We all strive to achieve a healthy lifestyle routine BUT that’s easier said than done… Let’s be honest, actually following through with such a consistent routine is difficult (trust me I know). That 10 week daily ab workout challenge that we said we were going to commit to during the start of quarantine? Nonexistent after 3 weeks? 1 week? 3 days?
We know that following a healthy lifestyle will significantly benefit both our bodies and our minds and we do genuinely want to follow through with it, yet... sometimes life just gets in the way, we’re busy with school/work, we become lazy, we tell ourselves we have more important stuff to do, etc.
Nonetheless it is clear that...
Young adults need a way to find the motivation and accountability to maintain a healthy lifestyle routine because having a healthy lifestyle greatly improves their emotional and physical wellbeing.
How might we provide a consistent form of motivation and accountability for young adults to firmly establish a healthy lifestyle routine as they balance school/work life?
FitLife is a mobile app that allows young adults to set and maintain their own schedule of exercise routines and form close connections with other people to build an encouraging community of fitness friends.
For this project, I decided to focus on young adults since that particular age group was found to be the most likely to participate in physical activity and to be most conscious of their health, based on desktop research.
In order to get a deeper understanding of the problem space and the target user audience themselves, I conducted 5 interviews with college students, recent graduates, as well as full-time working adults. From these interviews, I was able to discover common trends and patterns about the users’ goals, needs, and pain points.
1. People want to exercise because they want to look good for themselves and to keep their body in good shape.
2. Exercise is viewed as a social activity. People are more motivated to workout when accompanied or surrounded by other individuals.
3. Lack of motivation to exercise largely stems from feelings of laziness and busy school/work schedules.
4. The key factor that differentiates someone from giving in to or overcoming this lack of motivation is whether or not that person has already established a consistent routine.
After gathering these helpful insights from user research, I began to transform my ideas into life as I sketched out some screen designs with pencil and paper.
I then conducted several rounds of usability testing with both low and high fidelity prototypes, asking individuals to complete several tasks as I observed their thought process and noted down any issues or frustrations they encountered while interacting with the interface.
After receiving user feedback after each round of testing, I went through multiple iterations of my prototype. Specifically, the iterations of 2 of my app's key screens - My Schedule and Community pages - are highlighted below.
.png)
.png)
And just like that after 10 long weeks of hard work... FitLife was born!
Add and set workouts to your weekly schedule with timely reminder notifications that will keep you on top of your workouts.
Don’t know what workouts to do? Look through the app's diverse library of exercise routines and choose those best suited for your goals and needs.
Discover exercise buddies near you who can accompany and keep you accountable on your exercise journey.
As a bonus, complete weekly friend challenges to earn badges and awards!
It was extremely eye-opening to see how my app changed throughout the entire process from the initial ideation stage all the way to the final prototype as I continued to gather more and more insights and feedback from talking to and testing my prototypes with the users.
At the end of the day, we’re designing for the users, not for ourselves - crafting the best possible user experience requires taking the users’ needs and pain points into careful consideration.
I’d like to conduct additional usability tests to gather even more user feedback and use that to further iterate on my prototype.
I’d also want to add a short questionnaire in the initial onboarding process to better understand each user’s unique goals and needs and subsequently use that information to give them more personalized recommendations.
