A Contextual Design Approach for Creating a Holistic Fitness Application

Abstract

With the rising popularity of fitness and the growing need to record workouts for analytical or social purposes, there is an increasing demand for fitness application(s) that would cater to the requirements of the emerging lifestyle. Looking at the available applications, there are only a few of them, namely, Garmin Connect, Strava, RunKeeper, Map My Ride, Zombie Run and Zwift. From the reviews received on their websites or applications, multiple issues were identified. A few of them are syncing issues, notification issues, GPS issues, fitness goal update issues, and many more. Motivated by these shortcomings in a market of high demand, a contextual design approach was used to design a new fitness application that would benefit the fitness enthusiast without these issues. Intermediary steps in achieving this goal were - experience model construction, grand vision development, identification of persons, product concepts and their cool drilldowns, storyboarding, Generalized Transition Network (GTN), wireframing, prototyping, creating Usability Aspect Report (UAR) based on persona, and improvements made according to the UARs. Along with these, a few suggestions for further improvement have been made.