1. Based on preliminary litterature- and app research my working assumption is that most people don’t feel like they have time to be active in their daily life. Their other obligations, like work, family and friends, take much of their time and they struggle to set aside time for themselves and find motivation to do some type of physical exercise.

2. The last year, with Covid-19 has been hard on us all and disrupted our routines. Many of us spend more time at home, we socialize less and with gyms being closed my assumption is that this has affected peoples level of activity.

Research Goals

• How can we motivate busy people to find activities that suits them and commit?
• What motivates people to become more active?
• How can we help people increase their overall mental well-being with physical activity?
• Are existing fitness apps more focused on content and number of subcribers? Rather than motivation and incentives?

Research approach

My goal is to find out how we can become more active in our daily life and improve our mental wellbeing. I want to understand the user and their goals and challenges. In order to try and figure this out, I followed a descriptive research approach.

Method

• Survey (primary and generative method) – exploratory research to gather qualitative and quantitative data and insights on the topic.
• Competitive analysis (secondary and evaluative method) – to determine primary and secondary competitors. How they are performing and how well they are doing (SWOT analysis).
• Literature review (secondary and generative method) – to gather information about activity and it’s affect on mental wellness.
• Usability testing (primary and evaluative method) – conducted later in the design process to evaluate the mid-fidelity prototypes.

Primary research – Survey

I conducted a survey that got 29 responses most of whom were between 30-39 years old, have a family (partner or kids) work full-time and are only active once in a while. I also used this survey as a recruitment tool for the usability test – asking if they would participate.

I took the atomic research approach to analyse all the date collected through the survey, literture review and competitive analysis. This method helps with keeping the data logical and manageable. This is especially important when we analyse the material to turn the facts into meaningful insights.

Based on the facts from the Atomic research, I created an affinity map to create the insights. 

I discovered that

🔎 Click to enlarge

Brainstorming and Moodboard

To generate as many ideas as possible and fast, I chose brainstorming. I used the previous HMW-questions and problem statement as my main focus, and generated as many ideas as I could surrounding them.

The solution to the problem is thought to be an app (scenario insights). And this session will either validate the idea, or it will show me another better solution. In addition this branstorm will also help set the requirements for the solution.

To engage my visual senses as well, I created a moodboard to help me keep focuses and for further inspiration.

I found various solutions and features to my scenarios and problem statement, and started creating the requirements, information architecture and user flows.

🛠  Motivation to be more active. The app is geared towards busy people (office workers) and is tailored to the environment you’re in. The aim is to get people started, and show them that they don’t have to have alot of time in order to be active. Diversity in type of activities.

🛠 Set goals and track progress, get rewards for point collection or reaching goals. Rewards in the form of discounts, coupons etc.

Information architecture

To improve usability, this is the system that is used to organise and label information. The IA shows how the information in an app or on a website is organised and structured.

To make sure that the navigation was user friendly, easy to understand and predictable, a card sorting session was also conducted.

User Flows

These are based on the persona’s needs and goals, and how to get there in as few steps as possble. Considering her needs, frustrations and goals, this is how she might want to experience the product:

•  Register user
• Browse and chose activity to do
• Add activity to schedule
• Add goal
• See progress, track goals and how long to reward

Task Flows

Are a single flow that represent a task that is completed similarly by all users for a specific action. It tends to be linear, doesn’t branch ou and illustrates the main steps the user will take to reach a goal or complete a task.

Analyzing and Synthesizing

I used the atomic approach here as well, and an affinity map.

To summarize the results:

Our research questions were:

👣  How can we educate and motivate people to use less water in Norwegian households?

👣  What makes Norwegian households waste water?

👣  What direct action can every Norwegian take to reduce water consumption?

To gain a better understanding of water scarcity, wastage and/or conservation in our area we chose to do both qualitative and quantitative research.

✅ Questionaire: For exploratory research a survey was sent out.

✅ Literature review: to gather secondary research (generative).

✅ Interviews: 4-8 one-on-one interviews to gather qualitative data.

✅ Usability testing: to evaluate the low-fidelity prototype (evaluative).

Participants and Recruiting

Since our scope was very broad, e decided to categorize our users into three main categories. 

💻 Survey (50 participants)

📋 In-depth interviews (5 participants)

We chose these two research methods becuase qualitative surveys gives more insights than quantitative surveys. We wanted to uncover thoughts, motivations and knowledge about water waste. The survey was anonymous to make people comfortable speaking their tryth. And the interviews gave us an even deeper understanding.

At this stage we started ideating different solutions to water waste, and we started by conducting an ideation workshop to find solutions based on our HMW-questions. We voted on the tree best ideas. Since they all were ideas for an app, we then used mind-mapping to create the features and direction we wanted. We finished this off by using the NUF method to grade the tree best ideas to find the top idea, which were a value-chain app

✔️ Brainstorming (divergent thinking)

✔️ Mindmapping (Tree-model)

✔️ NUF (convergent thinking)

The Product..

..is an app that tackles a problem facing all consumers of water today; information about where the water comes from, how it’s used and what impact it has on the planet and people.

Adam is able to easily browse a product library which gives him a full overview of sustainable products and stores, he can also see the product information from materals and ingredients, down to the specific details such as origin and source of water.

If Adam doesn’t find a product in the library he can use the intuitive AR-scanner to quicly add a missing product to the library. He can set and track his personal goals in regards to reduction and see the impact his actions have directly. To make it even more rewarding, Adam collects points every time he scans a missing product and adds it to the library, which he later can cash-in by collecting coupons and discounts.

1. Screener

A mini-survey was sent out to people on social media platforms, and their answers either qualified or disqualified them for the user test.

2. Pilot test

Running a pilot test allowed us to test the facilitation techniques, test the script, tasks and the equipment to identify technical issues. We made the neccessary modifications after discovering inconsistencies, tested again before engaging the participants.

3. Usability test

Because of covid-19 we conducted this test remotely and moderated through phone/video interviews. This method gave us the opportunity to test any person in our city using an online communication program that records the participants when they tested the prototypes from Adobe XD.