Better Us
A new way for practicing sports
Contributor : Muchammad Ersan R., Borui L., Ernesto Alejandro C. C., Francesco Cataldo
Period : September - November 2019
Overview
BetterUs is a platform that enables sports lovers to create and participate in events with the goal to socialise with other people always taking care of their own body throughout their common desire for sport. The aim of Better Us is to motivate people to share the same interests and passions in physical activities. The original proposal consists in allowing people to create events in a short-medium-long term period
Design Goals
The application should help users to find their sports partners by filtering their interests, locations and available time.
The application should offer a social platform where users can keep in touch with each other. The users are able to communicate, compare the records, invite an outdoor activity or do other social behaviors with their friends in sports.
The application should engage users to do more sport with some rewards. Such as a badge system.
Storyboard
The storyboard presented below provide a better understanding of application overall.
Low Fidelity
Our initial concept is shown below.
The initial concept of application – low fidelity
To meet our design goals, we designed a low fidelity prototype. Our basic idea is combining social features and fitness features into an app. There are two main sections in our app:
Workout section
Workout section – low fidelity prototype
Offering a recording function for some sports. The user can use this function before starting their sports. The system will record the user’s sports data through the sensors in a user’s smartphone.Recording sports data can help the users to analyse themselves and make a comparison with their friends or other sports enthusiasts. The sports statistics of each user can be used for other social functionalities.
Challenge section
Challenge section – low fidelity prototype
Providing a competition function for the users by using their data from the workout section. There are two types of challenges, one is the individual challenge; a user can send a challenge to his friend by setting some sports goals. The person will win if he is the fastest person for reaching the goal. Group challenge is another type of challenge, which is started by the platform
High Fidelity Prototype
The figure below is our first version of the high-fidelity prototype, which is transformed from the previous low -fidelity prototype. There are several significant updates for improving the prototypes and will be discussed followed by.
The iteration of the prototype
Evaluation
The proposed App has been assessed through a qualitative approach methodology. Our group contacted students from the University of Melbourne to accomplishing the evaluations.
Interview - Semi Structured
The semi-structured interviews supported us to address potential technology issues, but mostly to make it more intuitive. The goal was to make it as much intuitive as possible since we believe users should be able to use it without any particular technical skills.
Observations – Cooperative evaluation
The chosen Cooperative Evaluation approach involves the participation of the user who will be asked to be an active rather than a passive co-operator. Particularly, the user and evaluator can communicate during the experience going deep in some passages for a better understating of the issue and clarify eventual confusion points.
Data analysis
All the evaluations have been conducted taking notes about all the information provided by users since we needed to find potential issues and most patterns which helped us to identify the limitations and benefits of the Better US App.
Feedback
The results in our evaluation were very useful for to improve our initial concept, the team had a better understanding in which features the user presented some discomfort while using the application, and also relevant information about what resulted not meaningful for them while trying to solve the given tasks. The focus of the users was mainly in the features: workout – challenge – activity.
Here the preview of users’ feedback
Iteration of design
The most relevant changes are related to the main functionalities which were evaluated by users.
Main menu comparison
Main Menu
The main menu of our prototype was completely restructured, and with this, combining features such as workout + challenges, aggregating friends and changing the icons with the addition of mini labels.
Activity feature improvements
Activity
In this feature the most relevant improvements are the change of the filter button, removing the refresh button, and adding a screen only for filter the activity map, also the create activity button is more highlighted. Additionally, considering participant 5 feedback, we added a listing page for listing all the activities.
Profile screen improvements
Profile and Friends Profile
Most of the feedback related to the profile screen was centered in the few understanding of the information showed, and the confusion created. We try to address these problems creating a clearer and fresh interface, yet still showing relevant information for users and their achievements.
Feed improvements
Feed
Even though the feed was one of the featureless discussed with participants, the overall structure was redesign allowing users to feel more familiar with it, removing chat and scan, because the concepts are not very related.
Workout and challenge improvements
Workout and Challenge
The workout and challenges section has been combined and redesigned in order to bring more clarity to users. The style of the workout was largely simplified and a filter was added to show a particular feature, which is showing most popular routes to user, aimed to be provided by other users with implicit crowdsourcing techniques, calculated by the platform. The feedback provided for each successful activity gives the opportunity for giving recommendation of places to practice activities.