It’s essential to maintain a regular exercise routine to stay healthy, but it’s always a tough task to stick with the habit or even getting started, especially for young professionals who are overwhelmed by screens. Our goal is to help people realize the pleasure of running and build running habits by providing an immersive and fun experience.
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In formative studies, we aimed to understand the pain points that 18 - 40 years old beginner runner currently experiencing and what will motivate them to start building a running habit.
We conducted the study with four participants over a 7-day period. We asked participants to log their daily running behaviors into a Google Sheet with predefined questions.
In order not only to collect in-depth information from our research target, but also to reach a wider range of audiences to understand the overall trend and common thoughts, we designed a survey and included it as part of our study. Our 5-min survey includes both close-ended and open-ended questions that mainly ask about people’s running habits, as well as their motivations and frustrations regarding running.
We used affinity mapping to analyze our study results from the diary study and survey, and we categorized our major findings into motivations, frustrations and needs. Below are some of our major insights which provided us design opportunities:
We designed five user enactments to test our design concepts. We recruited 5 participants, each of them is our target user who is either interested in building a running habit or already a runner, ages from 18-40. We took text records and photos to capture the full scenario of each enactment.
After the enactments, we followed up with questions that we want to dig more into and gather deeper insights.
After analyzing findings from our user enactments, we used collaborative ideation techniques first to ideate design ideas based on our findings and previous ideas. We then separated them into five Feature categories including reminder, preparation, lead the run, treasure hunting and stretching. We generated the following matrix with our lists of ideas to help us with the final features selection.
After combing the score and the insights we gained from the user enactments study, we eventually decided to remove some features we initially proposed, and also iterated and combined some of the features to best fit users’ mindset and our product goal.
Reminder: WoofieRun sends cross-device notifications to remind the user of the upcoming running schedule. The glasses will start to flash with a “woof” sound.
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Preparation: The user can choose their routes from suggesting trials. They can also select running pace based on their preference.
Stretching: The user will stretch with a human figure that provides visual and audio instructions both before and after the exercise to avoid potential injuries.
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Lead the run: 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.
Treasure hunt: 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.
Redeem rewards: Reward coins received from completing each run and the treasure hunt can be used for getting new outfits for Woofie.
-Limitation of current technology
Due to the fact that the AR technology is still developing and evolving, our concept still seems not practical from a technical perspective. Also, we were not able to test our ideas through IoT prototyping techniques using photons or other particles.
-Accessibility
The major features of WoofieRun rely a lot on both audio and visual feedback to provide immersive experiences to the users, however, these audio and visual elements are not accessible to hearing or vision impaired users. The UI components appear in AR glasses during running may also be hard to identify due to limited contrast of color under strong sunlight.
-Privacy
The route recommendation and leading the run feature will request to get access to user’s location information, which may be sensitive for some users. The built-in camera on the AR glasses may also be a factor that users worry about in terms of privacy, especially the glasses will be placed somewhere in the room most of the time.
- The gamification system
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)
- Prototyping in AR
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.
- Prioritize features
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.
- It is important to evaluate the demonstrability of the features before planning the prototype.
We came up with many features and interactions after the formative study and user enactments. As one of our design criteria, demonstrability, which evaluates whether creating and demonstrating the system in a video is doable with our timeframe and technical access, helped us choose the most essential features that can be best showcased in the final prototype.
- Video editing is a great way to show futuristic product concepts, but it also has limitations.
Creating a video that includes interactions with a physical product and AR objects requires a lot of effort and video editing skills yet not being able to demonstrate the most ideal experience. For example, the UI elements for the AR glasses do not look like they are floating in the environment when being directly added as a video layer, which could have been better demonstrated using AR design tools such as Adobe Aero.
