Exercise Rx

A fitness app to help sedentary individuals start moving

Overview

Background

This was the capstone project for my Master's degree at the University of Washington. The project was completed over a 15 week period. This project was sponsored by the Sports Institute at UW Medicine. When we joined, they had already decided they were going to make an iOS app, one for patients and one for physicians. We specifically worked on the patient app interface.

My Role

Project Manager

Work with project sponsor, set team deadlines, check status of team members, lead team meetings

User Researcher

Recruit/schedule participant, create study materials, conduct research methods, analyze & synthesize research results

Team

Connor O'Toole, Carrie Ding, Jenn Chan, Stefanie Gueorguiva

Problem Space

Physical activity is under discussed and under prescribed in the healthcare setting. American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) advocates healthcare providers to consider exercise as a criteria to evaluate the health of an individual, along with blood pressure and heart rate, etc.

However, doctors struggle with having the time to understand their patient’s lifestyle, educate them on the benefits of exercise, and recommend activities that fit their lifestyle and physical condition.

Solution

We designed the Exercise Rx app to best meet the needs of the intended sedentary patient population. Key features include an intuitive onboarding process, auto-generating workout lists, simple workout animations, and a streamlined communication portal between the patient and physician.

Project Timeline

Research

Literature Review

To start things off, we needed a working definition for "sedentary individual." Referencing current health literature, there were a number of metrics we could use, but settled on:

Sedentary Individual:

An individual that gets less than 5000 steps per day, does not regularly workout, and has few physically active hobbies.

We chose this definition because these metrics can be easily answered by most people in a simple screener, which would make recruiting much easier.

Additionally, we started researching behavior change models and how they're currently being implemented in mobile applications. We primarily focused on the Health Belief Model.

Competitive Analysis

We used reviews from the top fitness apps on the iOS App store to gain a fundamental understanding of what features people like or dislike. Some key insights from free and paid apps include:

Need for customization
Need for variety
Accurate exercise tracking with visualizations
Help boost confidence
Reliability of technology

We then did a deeper dive into the most popular apps to see how they specifically interfaced with their users.

User Interviews

With a more comprehensive understanding of the mobile fitness space, we moved onto conducting users interviews. There were 4 key areas we were interested in learning more about.

We conducted a total of 6 interviews each lasting approximately 1 hour. In addition to having a note-taker for each interview, they were audio recorded and transcribed to help make sure we got all the relevant info.

Define

Affinity Diagram

We created an affinity diagram to better organize our interview notes and help recognize patterns or interesting points brought up by participants.

Empathy Mapping

To help us better understand the internal and external struggles some participants face regarding exercise, we created an empathy map focusing on a combination of several of our interview participants.

User Journeys

Based on our interviews, along with talking to some doctors from our sponsor, we quickly identified two types of user groups that we would need to consider for our app.

1. Preventative Care: People who are currently healthy, but may develop issues in the future if they don't move more

2. Current Care: People that currently have health problems due to lack of exercise

To help better distinguish between these two groups, we decided to make a user journey map to help us identify places in the workflow where differences might arise between the two groups.

Project Refinement

With a better understanding of our interview data, an in-depth look into one character type, and an illustration of the user flow, our group created a set of design principles to help keep us on track as we moved into brainstorming.

Ideate

Brainstorm

With our design principles in hand, we began brainstorming what the interface for our app might look like and the features that could be included. Each team member individually drew some designs on their own, then we discussed them as a group.

After discussing the initial ideas, we took the best designs and created a list of features that we felt needed to be included in the final design.

Feature List

1. Onboarding Section

Ensure the user is supposed to be using this app
Ask basic health questions about the user
Find out if the user has any workout preferences
Establish a baseline activity metric
Have users set their first goal to work towards
Show them their workout activity list

2. Home Section

Allow users to easily navigate to other sections
Show simple but meaningful stats to the user
Show progress towards their current goal

3. Workout Section

Allow users to start their workout with as minimal effort as possible
Let users review the activities they'll do during a session
Provide an helpful information during each activity
Give users a way to indicate a problem with an activity
Show a post-workout summary

4. Challenges Section

Give users small goals to work towards
Provide a wide variety of goals with varying degrees of difficulty
Include a social aspect where users can share their progress

5. Educate Section

Provide additional educational articles for users
Content should be tailored based on interest and relevancy

My Focus

It was at this point where we divided up the sections among the team members. While we still collaborated on together, we decided it would be best if there was a main point person who would create prototypes and be responsible for each feature.

I took charge of the Onboarding and Workout sections. To start, I made simple low-fidelity digital prototypes to try and get an idea for how we could implement the ideas listed above.

Onboarding

Workout

Prototype & Test

RITE Method

With a working, albeit, simple clickable prototype, we started recruiting participants for our first round of user testing. While we were initially planning to run a standard usability study, after a pilot test we realized that we needed a more flexible and exploratory research method.

The Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) method is a great way to quickly implement user feedback into your design between participants. We used this method on a total of 6 participants, spreading the sessions to give us enough time to iterate in-between each session.

My Findings

Here are some of the key findings that were specific to my focus areas from this method:

Onboarding

Workout

Mid-Fi Prototype

After our final participant using the RITE method, we moved our prototype into Figma to increase the fidelity.

Once we had the majority of screens in Figma, we began recruiting for our next round of user testing. Because we were feeling more confident in the overall design, we decided to use standard usability testing.

Usability Testing

For this round, we recruited 5 participants to take part in a 1-hour long usability study. We had six scenarios prepared for the participants to help guide them through our app's features.

Product Requirements Document (PRD)

As we were wrapping up the project, we thought it best to go through our design and set a priority on each of the features included. This would help our sponsor with their beta app, as it would give a clear understanding of the most important pieces to work on.

Reflection

Next Steps

Our sponsor for this project had every intention to use our work as a starting to begin developing their app. With that in mind, it's important to consider the next steps that we would have taken if we had continued working with them.

Setup and run beta app study
- The next step that would need to happen would be to develop the beta version of the app and test it with users. With the beta version, it would be important to really hone in on who the core demographic for the first version of the app would be and have them interact with it.
Investigate Epic EHR Integration
- It was made clear from the start that a long term goal for the app would be to integrate directly with a user's electronic health record to better inform the app's systems. While this was out of the scope for our project, moving forward, this would definitely be something to consider researching.

Challenges

There were a number of challenges the team faced while working on this project. Here are some that I've personally reflected upon:

COVID-19
- This project took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused some complications. We were originally planning to hold all of our user studies in person, but had to quickly change our strategy once the stay-at-home order was in place.
Balancing class needs vs. sponsor needs
- Early on in the project, our group had the realization that there were vastly different needs for our class and our sponsor. For the class, we would want to create a fully fleshed out design to show what the completed app might look like. While that design would be useful for our sponsor, they were more interested in identifying the core features that would be need for a minimum viable product to start beta testing. It was because we recognized this difference in needs that we decided to create the PRD for our sponsor.