The Team
The group was formed by Leandro Iwai, Sinead Foley and Siobhan McBride. Leandro works for Worldnet, a fintech company based in Dublin. His primary focus is designing, testing and developing prototypes before moving new features into production. Sinead is a Senior Multimedia Designer and works for TV3. She manages a team of designers and generates concepts across a wide range of media. Siobhan is a UX/UI designer working for Pramerica. Her focus is to conduct research, create meaningful information architecture, user flows and prototypes for enterprise applications.
As Siobhan is based in another part of the country, the group will have to work from different locations and explore tools that allow collaboration without compromising the research. The group is on a mission to save physical Post-its.
Project Goals
The team decided to work on one of the health & fitness apps available in the market. At the start of the project, the goal was to make it as broad as possible, letting the users guide the research to find which app/site is the most popular and what problems the users using this tool are facing. Therefore, the initial goal became to remove the hurdles that users of health & fitness apps face while executing their tasks, encouraging them to reach their goals. The idea was to make this project a consultancy piece.
Domain
The domain chosen was health & fitness as everybody in the group could relate to past frustrations using different apps. There are various options for apps and sites in the market (Fig. 1). The most popular health and fitness applications are MyFitnessPal, Garmin Connect, Samsung Health, Fitbit, Lose It!, Google Fit and Apple Health. Each app has a different approach: some are tied to a fitness tracker; some concentrate solely on exercises and others on nutrition. While the most popular apps have a holistic approach regarding health & fitness, other are exclusively focused on either nutrition or exercising. This diverse ecosystem broadens the initial research. The goal was to find users’ favourite app and what motivates them to use it.
