As part of my graduate course on personal health informatics and data visualization, I worked on a team of three to design a mobile app that helps workers who perform desk job become more active and build healthier habits. My team designed a Figma prototype for a mobile app that helps users track their daily activity. I acted as a user interface designer, conducting secondary research, wireframing, and refining the visual design of the final solution.
User Interface Designer
User Research • Visual Design • Prototyping • Web Development
Figma
Studies have shown how performing long-time desk jobs can affect body posture and result in chronic pain and unhealthy lifestyle. Knowing this information, we wanted to create a mobile application that would address issues that workers face in the wake of sedentary behavior and promote a healthier lifestyle.
Our team read studies on quantifying lower back pain in the workplace, on the nature of sedentary behavior in the workplace, on effects of job type on level of physical activity, on effects of tracking in the workplace, and on effects of health campaigns and interventions in the workplace. Our team also conducted market research of existing fitness apps. From our research, we identified gaps in the research and user needs that our design could address.
From our research and synthesis, we identified these user needs.
We conducted user interviews with five participants who work in-person and have some degree of interest in improving their physical health through tracking and exercise. After our interviews, we used thematic analysis and affinity mapping to synthesize our thoughts and generate insights. We also sent surveys to workers and received 21 responses. We asked questions about current tracking activity, motivation for participation, and health-related behavior. From our research we uncovered that users had similar pain points and needs that we would need to address in our design.
From our user interviews and survey, we uncovered specific user pain points.
From our user interviews and survey, we uncovered more user needs.
How might we use the collaborative characteristics of a workplace to help workers exercise and reach a healthier lifestyle?
From our user research, we developed two personas to help guide our app design and presentation.
Based on our research, we considered how our design might encourage reflection, encourage group activity, leverage social interaction, and make it easier to see individual results. This led us to focus on tracking exercise time, steps, and distance, while creating ways for users to set their own goals, reflect, and interact with one another.
Our team designed an early user test to engage employees in a fitness challenge which took place from December 16, 2023 to November 19, 2023 to validate our assumptions that employees would want to participate in a challenge. For the challenge, 15 out of the 45 employees invited registered, and 73% of the participants remained actively engaged throughout the challenge period. During that period, participants entered their physical activity time every day. Results revealed the desire to participate in a challenge and the potential for our app to provide motivating visuals to keep users engaged.
Based on our research, we designed our initial wireframes to address the specific user needs that we uncovered. From our user interviews and surveys, we uncovered their willingness to participate in group activities and their individual motivations. As such, our app would address these user needs by providing collaborative abilities, including group forming, setting group goals. Our participants had indicated the need for effective reflection on their activities, so our app would use data visualizations, like line graphs and bar charts, to show trends and achievements. Outside of motivations to improve health, our participants expressed indicated their enjoyment of rewards and badges, so we decided to include these in our design. In our market research and literature reviews, we found a lack of flexibility in tracking in collaborative apps on the market, with many applications requiring smartwatch connectivity. To improve accessibility for our application, we decided on semi-manual tracking features to allow users add their activities manually. We also added an option to connect to wearable devices for users who have such devices already or are motivated to track their activity more precisely.
After establishing the basic features of our app, we honed in on the style and tone of our design as we began to refine it. We decided on a professional tone with a simple and clean style.
Using our style guide, we refined our prototype. We debated the data visualizations that would best represent information to the user and we considered the significance of color in our design within our limited color palette.
The user can track their daily steps, distance traveled, and active minutes broken down into cardio, flexibility, and strength. They can quickly track active minutes in real time through the tracking timer or by adding workout information utilizing semi-automated tracking. Semi-automated tracking gives users flexibility for how and when they want to record their activity and encourages them to engage with the app more frequently to exercise and break sedentary habits.
The user can set daily goals for their activity time, steps, and distance. Their activity time is split up by cardio, flexibility, and strength. We uncovered through our research that setting goals would encourage users to be more active. Our app would also analyze the user's data to recommend new goals if the user is on track to become more active or if the user is consistently missing their goal and needs to set a more reasonable goal for themself.
The user can set up and participate in a group collaboration, where all members of the group contribute to a collective goal for users who are motivated more by collaboration than competition. In the collaboration tab, the user can see the collective progress of the group and view their own contribution. The icon-shaped stacked bar chart for displaying collective group progress provides a playful, dynamic, and friendly way to view essential data.
The user can set up and participate in a competition, where individuals or groups compete against each other to end up with the greatest distance traveled, most steps, or most activity time. In the competition tab, the user can see their ranking among the rest of the competition and within their own team. The competition feature encourages users who are motivated by competition, and the group competition allows for users to exercise their competitive spirit within a collective for those who enjoy more of a mix of competition and collaboration.
The user can see their long-term tracking data in the calendar and weekly report. The calendar shows the user which days they reached their goals and where they are on track to receive awards. The weekly report shows the user trends in their individual and group activities, as well as their achievements. The summary tab allows the user to more easily recognize their progress over time and encourage them to continue reaching their goals.
To test our final prototype, we recruited 5 target users. Our participants were office workers ages 38-55, 2 male and 3 female. We scheduled sessions in an office environment using a smartphone with the Figma prototype loaded to simulate real-world usage. We conducted concurrent think aloud sessions to further simulate real-world usage using 6 task scenarios. We took performance measures such as success, time, and errors. Subjective measures included the participants' self-reported satisfaction and comfort ratings. In general all participants found the WorkWellness app to be engaging, colorful, straightforward, and easy to use. We found that 4 of the 5 participants (80%) would use the application to track fitness in a workplace fitness challenge.
Overall, the WorkWellness application has the potential in a workplace setting to motivate employees to increase physical activity and support workplace wellness corporate initiatives. The application design met the objectives and incorporated important elements of competition and collaboration to motivate individuals and inspire healthy lifestyle behaviors. We would be interested in performing a longitudinal study that can reveal interesting insights to evaluate the success of the program from a corporate wellness perspective.
I found it interesting to consider how to motivate users to exercise using social incentives rather than strictly goals for individual improvement. I found the most challenging aspect of the design to be deciding how to utilize color to highlight important information with such a limited palette of colors. Keeping a limited palette of colors made the design feel more minimalist, professional, and comforting, but it made it more difficult for us to keep the meanings of colors consistent across the design.
I also found it an enjoyable challenge to decide how to visualize the data across our design. I liked our ultimate decision to use cards for the different visualizations in the collaboration and competition pages as it solved the problem of users needing to scroll far vertically to see more information while making good use of visual space.
