Lo-fi

Refocusing our idea

After our last milestone, our team decided to take hard look at our application’s central concept. We determined that our idea (which, at the time, was an application in which walkers would gain points and redeem them at local businesses) was not tied enough to our user research. So we revisited our user group, and realized that we had two distinct age groups with different behavior patterns. We decided to narrow the age range of our target user population to 27-35 years old, and we revisited the needs, problems, and motivations within that age group. Walking to reduce stress, unwind, or focus was a common theme, and we decided to focus on a mobile application that would make more visually explicit the link between walking and stress.

The central functions would be for the user to input his or her stress level at the beginning and end of a walk; the reduction in stress would be made clear in a ‘fun’ way by the application. Over time users could track both their stress and walking levels, and they could also see some visualizations of community stress and walking. Our ‘to the moon’ idea, to show different towns’ progress in a race to the moon, became more central in this application than in our other application.

Initial brainstorming

Our team first created a rough flowchart to indicate how users could traverse through the application. We then brainstormed how the various application screens could be visually represented.

Paper prototyping: taking it to the streets

We wanted to test our ideas with users as soon as possible, so we decided to test our app on paper. We refined our initial drawings and transferred them to a set of index cards; we rendered the drawings in the size and shape of the Android phones we will eventually use for our hi-fidelity testing. The below image shows the cards organized into the three main sections of the application; the first row is the ’start walking’ function, the second shows some of the user-specific data visualizations, and the third shows two of the collective or community visualizations.

Click to enlarge the below image.

We tested 5 users in our approximate age group – age 24 to 34. We asked the users to perform key tasks that included going for a walk with the application and going through the stress input flow, interpreting and interacting with a graph that indicated their stress and walking statistics, interpreting a map that showed their past routes and another that showed community stress levels. We also asked users to interpret the ‘to the moon’ image. We asked open ended questions throughout the test in order to collect valuable feedback on the app’s UI as well as its underlying concepts and assumptions.

Key Findings

Issues to address:

Users had a difficult time with the visualization of stress and walking over time. It was unclear which time period was showing by default, and they were not sure how to change the time period once it was set. One user also said he was not sure how to see where one time period (like ‘day’) ended another began. Users also did not know what to make of the message ‘you were 60% stressed’ at a specific point in time, and multiple people expressed confusion about the lack of a y-axis on the chart we showed them.
The explicit connection of reducing stress through walking was not universally understood or accepted. One user said that the word stress was a loaded term.
The routes graph was cryptic. While we had intended to show most-frequently traveled routes using line thickness on the routes graph, users did not understand this – one thought it had to do with stress levels. Another user did not know how to tell where a route began and ended. Users did understand what the faces meant at each end of a given route, but a third user mentioned that she travels the same routes consistently, so her mood might drastically vary.
We will need to remind users to confirm stress level post-walk. Two users expressed concern that they would not remember to do this unless they were prompted.
Menu option terms were not always clear. Some of the terms were confusing – ”others’ progress” was not descriptive of what people found in that category, and ‘goals’ in the collective menu was not clear.

Successes:

Users generally understood how to use the application to ‘go for a walk.’ They were able to successfully change their stress levels, and if they disagreed with the forecast stress level they all had the instinct to correct it. They understood the mapping of their stress onto the robot.
Users liked the robots and ‘to the moon’ themes. One user said that he liked a robot instead of a human face, because the robot felt less judgmental.

Actions we are taking as a result of testing:

Moving away from the term ’stress.’ We agree that stress is a loaded term, and we don’t have a clear formula for determining how much someone’s stress should be reduced as they are walking. We are still working on this idea, but we are looking toward terms like ‘drained’ vs ‘refreshed’ instead of high vs low stress.
Removing the ’stress map’ from the application for now. It does not further our goal of motivating people to walk, but we think it would be useful; we imagine that it could be somehow accessible from the web.
Adding additional elements of competition. We heard that people were interested in competing, both within a group as well as being able to compare themselves to others. We are in the process of adding a ‘race yourself’ feature that will allow users to compete with their past selves in ‘real time,’ as they are walking. We are also considering placing each user into a predefined team based on their town – so Ann Arbor might have team A and team B. We are talking about how to use these teams to bring the sense of competition closer to home and further motivate people to walk

Refining our concepts and images

Our team finally met to discuss our paper prototyping tests and continue to refine our images. We continued to think critically about what to include and not include in the app, and one screen was pulled out for the time being (as mentioned above). We have also continued to brainstorm further possibilities for creating motivation and engagement, and we are continuing to research topics on goal-setting and motivating walking.

Below are some images from our last work session.

Refined Images

We took some of the feedback we received from our testers and updated some of our key screens. See some of them below or Download a PDF to see more our updated lo-fidelity images..

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