Motivate.Me is a prototype mobile phone application designed to help young people and students stay active and keep working towards their fitness goals. This design project was developed at the University of Toronto as the course project for CSC318: The Design of Interactive Computational Media.
Motivation for exercise is an issue experienced by many looking to live a healthier lifestyle. There are always intentions to become more fit, but the execution is often lacking. With Motivate.Me, we want to use the power of a mobile platform combined with gamification and social interactions in order to help users stay on track to achieve their fitness goals. Our target population is students and working adults who have trouble finding the time, or keeping being motivated to exercise.
We employed the method of Human-Centered Design throughout the development of this project.
We first researched our problem space of fitness motivation individually in order to explore problems and potential solutions, by analyzing research papers relevant to the problem space and conducting user research through interviews, surveys, and field studies. After combining and discussing results with the team, we decided to focus on four main aspects that we found the most important in developing this solution: technology, motivation, social factor, & fitness, and we drafted a list of requirements that we deemed necessary to include in our solution.
After the group was clear on the set of requirements, we individually designed low-fidelity prototypes focused on a specific aspect of the solution we were looking for. We tested these low-fidelity prototypes with our target audience and experts in the field, and then reflected on what worked best and what didn't work for everyone's prototypes. We took the best aspects of each group member's prototypes, and combined them to form our high-fidelity prototype. With this prototype, we conducted user testing with our target audience to gain feedback on the things that worked well and things that didn't, and reflected on the shortcomings of the prototype while continuing to make it better through iterations, before arriving at the final solution that we were happy with.
The final high-fidelity prototype is hosted at the following site:
Motivate.Me was designed and developed by 6 students from the University of Toronto.
- Ellen (Yufei) Chen
- [Reece Martin] (https://github.com/reecemartin)
- Louise Xia
- Kyle Haas
- Manuel Velarde
- Yi Liu
Special thanks to our professor, Ilona Posner, for giving us the opportunity to work on this project that we are very proud of!