FitBreak: Supporting employee wellness during a pandemic
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[Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp Project]
Overview
A two-week sprint to create a wellness app as part of Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp.
My role
UX/UI Designer. I was involved in every aspect of the process, from research to analysis and design.
Teammates
Adriana Fischer — UX/UI Designer
Methods and tools
Lean Survey Canvas, Qualitative Interviews, Competitor Analysis, Affinity Diagram, User Persona, User Journey Map, Problem and Hypothesis Statement, Moscow Method, User Flow, Brainstorming, Crazy 8, Prototyping, Mood board, Style Tile, User Testing, Wireframing
Maze, Figma
01.The Challenge
Covid19 changed our lives in ways we didn’t know were possible. Suddenly going about our daily routine became a health concern and the workforce had to adapt to this change, fast. As a big chunk of the officer workers switched to the home office, many struggled with balancing their work with duties at home and taking care of themselves.
This is why, for our brief to create a wellness app, we decided to focus on a corporate fitness app that empowers employees to incorporate more fitness into their workweek.
During our sprint, we faced several challenges from finding a meaningful gap we could fill in an increasingly saturated market to prioritizing features to implement for our MVP within a tight deadline.
We overcame these issues by keeping the user in focus and making sure that each decision we arrived at could be validated by data.
02.The Process
Lean Survey Canvas and User Interviews
Our first step was to explore the current situation. We wanted to understand, how Covid19 changed the way employees work out, how they preferred to exercise, and what was being offered to them as solutions.
To get high-level information about these issues and validate our assumptions, we sent out a quantitative survey directed at home-office workers.
Insights from User Survey
- The majority of employees who are working from home are exercising less due to lack of equipment and space.
- They perceive exercising as a necessity for health.
- They’d appreciate their employer’s support to work out more during the week.
- They all have different preferences when it comes to the type of exercise they like to do, the duration, and the time within the day.
- They don’t want to feel obligated to work out or have the employer track their progress in any way.
The User Persona
Aiming to gain perspective on our potential user’s psychology and daily habits, we also conducted qualitative interviews with a group of home-office workers. By analyzing the results of the survey and interviews, we defined our user persona, Cristina.
Having Cristina guide us throughout the design process made us realize a few things we need to accomplish for our design:
- The app needs to be customizable in terms of exercise, duration, and schedule to suit her needs
- It needs to make communicating Cristina’s schedule with her employers smooth and stress-free.
Competitive Analysis
As the initial ideas for our app started to surface, we explored what competitors were doing to aid home-office workers who wanted to exercise from their homes. For our competitor research, we focused on companies that provide corporate fitness services rather than the usual suspects such as Youtube and Instagram.
As we expected, we saw that this line of business has grown immensely since the start of the pandemic and there was no point in being “another corporate fitness app”.
So, we analyzed our competitors from the perspective of Cristina’s needs and found out that almost none of them cover the issue of communicating employee’s fitness schedules with their employers. We realized that this was a huge gap in the market that our app could fill.
Brainstorming Possibilities
After a brainstorming and sketching session fueled by the insights available to us, we arrived at an idea to have employees sync their business calendars with the app. So whenever they booked an exercise in their app, they could save it in their calendars, and the relevant employers and colleagues would know.
We were aware that implementing this idea would depend on figuring out other things as well: how flexible could the employees be and how could they exercise within working hours without hindering collaboration and their performance.
Going back to research showed us that even before Covid, many companies were allowing or even encouraging employees to work out within working hours at office gyms. The key to exercising within working hours was setting guidelines about duration and defining available timeslots.
Gaining inspiration from this idea, we opted to create an admin functionality to the app in which admins could define available timeslots for their teams to ensure collaboration and productivity.
Before finally starting to design the prototype of the app, we used the Moscow method to identify our priorities for our MVP. This was a crucial step in our process since we had about a week to finalize our design for both IOS and Android.
Defining the priorities for the MVP
Before finally starting to design the prototype, we used the Moscow method to identify our MVP priorities.
User Flows
To showcase the functionalities of our MVP, we decided on designing our prototype according to two user flows:
- A first-time user sets up their profile and saves a workout that they like to their calendar.
- A returning user does their daily exercise and goes to the Progress page to see their performance.
Mid-fidelity Prototypes
Getting feedback at an early stage was essential to provide a delightful experience, so once we designed the mid-fi prototype for both flows, we tested it with users through Maze.
Noting the few refinements to implement, we moved on to the next stage, branding and the design system to guide our high-fi design.
Branding
When searching for a name, we intended to convey the app’s value, cultivating self-care through fitness during work hours. After many trials, we decided on FitBreak because it is easy to remember and conveys our key message effectively.
For colors, we knew that the branding still needed to look professional and grounded while being energetic. So, we created a complementary palette consisting of warm and milky yellows with a vibrant purple.
Our choice for the typeface reflected the optimistic, encouraging, and nurturing tone of the brand.
03. The Solution
Solidifying ideas with a high-fidelity prototype
Once we had the branding and the design system in place, we designed the high-fidelity prototype for the first flow.
The flow follows a first-time user who sets up their preferences for exercises and saves an exercise to their business calendar.
04. Takeaways
I really enjoyed working on this project as we get to be really creative with the features and the branding of a mobile app.
It has been also an invaluable experience to think about our priorities and maintain a sharp focus on delivering them in the best way possible within a tight deadline. Realizing this early in the process allowed us to voice our opinions openly and arrive at mutual decisions, which was crucial for the success of the project.
Thank you for reading :)
