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Survey, Diary Study, Affinity Wall, User Enactment, Prototyping, Storyboarding, Speed Dating Matrix, User scenarios
Bingyi Liu, Chelsea Ma
Ningdan Zhang, Ruoning Li
Sept - Nov 2020 (Semester Long)
Figma, zoom
How might we help people realize the pleasure of running and build running habits by providing an immersive and fun experience?
WoofieRun aim to help users maintain their Running habits. Our primary consumers are 18 - 40 years old beginner runners who wanting to develop a habit of outdoor running.
WoofieRun is evolutional and innovative in motiving users to make healthy behavioral changes while still satisfying their needs of companionship in the context of pandemics.
WoofieRun provides an immersive and fun experience utilizing AR technologies. Users could run aside their ideal running buddy Woofie and grow stronger together by exploring adventures.
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With our diary study, we aimed to understand the running behaviors of our target users. We conducted the study with four participants over a 7-day period.
In order to reach a wider range of audiences to understand the overall trend and common thoughts, we designed a survey and got 80 responses.
After analyzing the Diary study and Survey information, we conducted two follow-up interviews with the dairy study participants to clarify the results.
What pain points do beginner runners have when trying to maintain a running habit?
" I wanted to run, I realised I lack some accessories, I ordered online, when it finally arrive I was interested on something else"
Although not many survey participants have the experience of getting injured, many mentioned that they are afraid of getting injured.
83.8% of our survey participants prefer to run alone to get away from peer pressures, but they also enjoy interacting with others along the road to make the running less boring.
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Both survey participants and diary study participants mentioned that they struggled to find a good route to run.
What Motivate runners to maintain their running schedule?
People like to see their accomplishments during a short period to motivate them to keep their healthy lifestyles.
85% of the participants point out that they feel relaxed and happier every time after the running exercise.
more than 65% of our participants started their running habits over the past 6 months. People prefer to run outside because addtional to the benifits of losing weight, improve health and relieving mental stress, outdoor running has the lowest health risk compared to other exercise methods.
Ideation - What design opportunities do we have to help our target customers maintain their running schedule?
The concept of an AR dog works as runners' perfect running buddy. Before the running, it provides weather, recommended clothing, stretching guides, and running routes to help users get ready for the exercise. During the running, it can lead the trail, explore new attractions as well as provide companionship for their master. After the running, users can stretch with their dog and look at what they accomplished.
The AR dog will grow as users building their running habits and accomplishing milestones. Users also can earn coins by keeping exercising to raise their dog (dog food, houses, and outfits). Moreover, there are random events (ie. Treasure huntings) to help users engage with the social space and discover the beauty of running along the road.
We discussed and narrowed down to focus on our “AR dog” idea, giving the feedback we got during the presentation of milestone 2, as well as the overall evaluation with the design criteria we created below:
The system should make outdoor running more fun for users.
The system should bring interactions between users and their environment to better motivate their behaviors.
the system should help users build running habits by nudging their behavior.
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the system should be customizable based on their running habits
The system should bring users a sense of accomplishment after they complete tasks in motivating them to continue their behavior
The system should provide solutions to people’s safety concerns with outdoor running including getting injured, choosing a dangerous route at night, etc.
We designed five user enactments selected from our feature speed dating matrix to study which design alternatives works the best for our target user groups. We came up with following design decisions:
Click here to see detailed scripts / Click here to see all design decisions
“I would like to be notified not only on my phone but also on my other devices - apple watch, ipad, macbook, tv - whatever I’m using.”
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“I may get bored and numbed after several uses, and start to treat it as a normal reminder. ”
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“ I would love to have a function that can show the progress(time, distance, etc.) and maybe the calories burnt on the corner of the UI.”
“There’s no need for the dog to stretch with me. I can’t imagine the dog doing human-like gestures, and I would feel so weird if it does so.”
WoofieRun sends cross-device notifications to remind the user of the upcoming running schedule. The glasses will start to flash with a “woof” sound.
The user can choose their routes from suggesting trials. They can also select running pace based on their preference.
The user will stretch with a human figure that provides visual and audio instructions both before and after the exercise to avoid potential injuries.
While running, Woofie leads the run in front of the users at an appropriate distance. It provides audio feedback, visual animations, and real-time performance data to encourage the user.
Woofie will guide the user on a surprise treasure hunt. The user will receive virtual coins or limited virtual outfit rewards based on the location and time during the treasure hunt.
Reward coins received from completing each run and the treasure hunt can be used for getting new outfits for Woofie.
Gamification is a very complex topic. A game system involves elements like scores, badges, levels, leaderboards, random events and their possibilities, community interactions, etc. Due to the limited time and the focus of this course, we proposed a rough gamification system. Given more time, we would further envision the system, test with real users, and iterate as the system goes on and users become advanced. For example, Woofie gets stronger as the user sticks to their running schedule, interact/compete with friends (leaderboard)
We prototyped our system using video editing instead of AR due to the limitation of current technology and the nature of online class. Although video is capable of conveying the idea and design of the system, it’s not enough for users to evaluate the whole experience. Given more time and devices, we would prototype the game in the AR world.
In our survey, we discovered that running habits are largely influenced by the participant’s job occupation and geographic location. Due to the limited time, we decided to keep our eyes on the needs around ourselves first, which made our typical persona a college student living in a college town. Currently, features are prioritized to serve the needs of that user group. Given more time, we would conduct user research with a more diverse user group and re-prioritize features according to these different user needs.