Husky Fit

Promoting Social Gym Activity at the University of Washington Main Campus Gym

Project Overview

Role

Duration

UX Designer

10 weeks

Many students at the University of Washington exercise at the main gym on campus — the Intramural Arts Building (IMA) — but feel anxious or discouraged or from participating in group sports or activities when they go to the IMA alone. Many students who want to begin going to the IMA also feel uncomfortable going to the gym alone as beginners and wish to find workout partners or groups.In the span of 10 weeks, my three team members and I developed this project in an upper level course in our Human Centered Design & Engineering curriculum.

How can we improve the campus gym experience for students to ensure students feel more included and comfortable at the gym?

Researching Our Audience

01

02

Finding people for group activities can be difficult

It can be daunting to try new gym activities alone

03

Users spend a lot of time trying to schedule time to workout with friends

For this project, I conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with IMA users of various gym experience levels to learn about their gym habits. I also wanted to learn about their social goals related to fitness — such as whether they wanted to meet new people at the gym. Consolidating our findings, I gained a better sense of our users’ pain points and goals, which helped me in the next step — creating user personas.

Applying Research Findings into Insights


I created these personas so I could understand the perspectives of the users and implement those into the feature design of our app. Both of these personas were based directly on the experiences and goals that I found from conducting user research. These personas helped me contextualize prospective users’ journeys and integrate user desires, goals, and pain points into our solution.


Mapping Our Research Insights


Creating a user journey map allowed me to target user struggles and create a more fluid and intuitive user flow. I created the user journey map based off of Sarah — one of the previous personas we created — as she was an ideal user of our product and her user journey provided us with more gymgoers’ insights on those using our product. This map provided us with a graphic representation of where users were unhappy with their gym experience and where we could improve their experience.


Creating a user journey map allowed me to target user struggles and create a more fluid and intuitive user flow. I created the user journey map based off of Sarah — one of the previous personas we created — as she was an ideal user of our product and her user journey provided us with more gymgoers’ insights on those using our product. This map provided us with a graphic representation of where users were unhappy with their gym experience and where we could improve their experience.


Creating Design Requirements for Our Solution


01

02

03

Connect people with similar interests and hobbies


Foster a comfortable level of social interaction for the user


04

Match users looking for gym partners

Allow users to message friends/gym groups

I used the user journey maps to look at what specific areas we needed to target to improve gym users’ experiences. After viewing these areas, I targeted these experiences by coming up with our list of design requirements to help me better understand the goals that users would accomplish when using our product. These design requirements also helped my group members and I reach a consensus on what features our final solution would have.

Applying Design and Research to Stories


Each team member created two storyboards to translate our user research, personas, and user journeys into an understandable and more easily processed medium. I created the one on the left. With these storyboards, we had a good understanding of what scenarios our users might be in and what goals they had in mind when using our product.



Mapping Out Our Solution


I created an information architecture map to help flesh out the design and features of our solution without building our final solution. It helped me understand the user flows and navigation throughout our app. It also helped me easily visualize what features or wireframes were necessary.



Drawing Out Low-Fidelity Prototypes


I created low fidelity “paper prototypes” next to focus on building out general mobile features without getting bogged down by the details. I focused more on the functionality/framework of our design through these low-fidelity prototypes rather than design details. They allowed us to refine our ideas and features so we could build a strong basis for our solution while leaving room for redesigns based on user testing.

Final Design

View Prototype

View Prototype

View Prototype

Final Reflection

Throughout this project, I learned about the overall design process and about user-centered design. I enjoyed quickly going through the different parts of the design process — research, ideating, prototyping etc. One of the biggest challenges our team faced was the lack of time as we only had 10 weeks to complete this project. If I had more time, I would want to conduct more initial user research and more usability testing. The initial four interviews we did didn’t accurately reflect the majority of IMA users so I would have like to conduct more interviews with diverse potential users. I would have also liked to spend more time conducting user testing to gain more insights on our solution so we could better improve it.

One important takeaway I learned from this project was the importance of communicating early on. Since we only had 10 weeks to complete this project, it was important that my team worked quickly and efficiently. With COVID-19 flaring up during this project, we often felt overwhelmed with our work or had unexpected issues arise. Communicating often and early on was super helpful because we were able to support each other throughout the process and work effectively and efficiently.

Husky Fit
promoting social gym activity at the University of Washington main campus gym

Project Overview

Role

Duration

UX Designer

10 weeks

Many students at the University of Washington exercise at the main gym on campus — the Intramural Arts Building (IMA) — but feel anxious or discouraged or from participating in group sports or activities when they go to the IMA alone. Many students who want to begin going to the IMA also feel uncomfortable going to the gym alone as beginners and wish to find workout partners or groups.In the span of 10 weeks, my three team members and I developed this project in an upper level course in our Human Centered Design & Engineering curriculum.


How can we improve the campus gym experience for students to ensure students feel more included and comfortable at the gym?

Many students at the University of Washington exercise at the main gym on campus — the Intramural Arts Building (IMA) — but feel anxious or discouraged or from participating in group sports or activities when they go to the IMA alone. Many students who want to begin going to the IMA also feel uncomfortable going to the gym alone as beginners and wish to find workout partners or groups.In the span of 10 weeks, my three team members and I developed this project in an upper level course in our Human Centered Design & Engineering curriculum.


How can we improve the campus gym experience for students to ensure students feel more included and comfortable at the gym?

Many students at the University of Washington exercise at the main gym on campus — the Intramural Arts Building (IMA) — but feel anxious or discouraged or from participating in group sports or activities when they go to the IMA alone. Many students who want to begin going to the IMA also feel uncomfortable going to the gym alone as beginners and wish to find workout partners or groups.In the span of 10 weeks, my three team members and I developed this project in an upper level course in our Human Centered Design & Engineering curriculum.

How can we improve the campus gym experience for students to ensure students feel more included and comfortable at the gym?

Researching Our Audience

01

02

Finding people for group activities can be difficult

It can be daunting to try new gym activities alone

03

Users spend a lot of time trying to schedule time to workout with friends

For this project, I conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with IMA users of various gym experience levels to learn about their

gym habits. I also wanted to learn about their social goals related to fitness — such as whether they wanted to meet new people

at the gym. Consolidating our findings, I gained a better sense of our users’ pain points and goals, which helped me in the next

step — creating user personas.

For this project, I conducted 4 semi-structured interviews with IMA users of various gym experience levels to learn about their gym habits. I also wanted to learn about their social goals related to fitness — such as whether they wanted to meet new people at the gym. Consolidating our findings, I gained a better sense of our users’ pain points and goals, which helped me in the next step — creating user personas.

Applying Research Findings into Insights


I created these personas so I could understand the perspectives of the users and implement those into the feature design of our app. Both of these personas were based directly on the experiences and goals that I found from conducting user research. These personas helped me contextualize prospective users’ journeys and integrate user desires, goals, and pain points into our solution.


Mapping Our Research Insights


Creating a user journey map allowed me to target user struggles and create a more fluid and intuitive user flow. I created the user journey map based off of Sarah — one of the previous personas we created — as she was an ideal user of our product and her user journey provided us with more gymgoers’ insights on those using our product. This map provided us with a graphic representation of where users were unhappy with their gym experience and where we could improve their experience.


Creating Design Requirements for Our Solution


01

02

03

Connect people with similar interests and hobbies


Foster a comfortable level of social interaction for the user


04

Match users looking for gym partners

Allow users to message friends/gym groups

I used the user journey maps to look at what specific areas we needed to target to improve gym users’ experiences. After viewing these areas, I targeted these experiences by coming up with our list of design requirements to help me better understand the goals that users would accomplish when using our product. These design requirements also helped my group members and I reach a consensus on what features our final solution would have.

Applying Design and Research to Stories


Each team member created two storyboards to translate our user research, personas, and user journeys into an understandable and more easily processed medium. I created the one on the left. With these storyboards, we had a good understanding of what scenarios our users might be in and what goals they had in mind when using our product.



Mapping Out Our Solution


I created an information architecture map to help flesh out the design and features of our solution without building our final solution. It helped me understand the user flows and navigation throughout our app. It also helped me easily visualize what features or wireframes were necessary.



Drawing Out Low-Fidelity Prototypes


I created low fidelity “paper prototypes” next to focus on building out general mobile features without getting bogged down by the details. I focused more on the functionality/framework of our design through these low-fidelity prototypes rather than design details. They allowed us to refine our ideas and features so we could build a strong basis for our solution while leaving room for redesigns based on user testing.

Final Design

View Prototype

Final Reflection

Throughout this project, I learned about the overall design process and about user-centered design. I enjoyed quickly going through the different parts of the design process — research, ideating, prototyping etc. One of the biggest challenges our team faced was the lack of time as we only had 10 weeks to complete this project. If I had more time, I would want to conduct more initial user research and more usability testing. The initial four interviews we did didn’t accurately reflect the majority of IMA users so I would have like to conduct more interviews with diverse potential users. I would have also liked to spend more time conducting user testing to gain more insights on our solution so we could better improve it.

One important takeaway I learned from this project was the importance of communicating early on. Since we only had 10 weeks to complete this project, it was important that my team worked quickly and efficiently. With COVID-19 flaring up during this project, we often felt overwhelmed with our work or had unexpected issues arise. Communicating often and early on was super helpful because we were able to support each other throughout the process and work effectively and efficiently.