In one of my blog posts I talked about and app that we, as a team, for one of our classes, where going to develop. This app is called Go! Exercise which has the objective of helping people achieve personal goals through exercise and, at the end, feel happy after achieving their goals. In those posts I also explained where the concept came from, but in this post, I’m going to focus on explaining how the experience was of creating an app.
There are millions of fitness apps already out there, so, even though this was an assessment, we wanted to create something different and unique. I am a firm believer that if you are going to do something, do it good and the best you possibly can. Maybe that was an issue for me and Natalia, another team member, because we had millions of ideas in mind and the biggest problem was going to be to put all of them into paper and into an actual prototype.
Besides creating something different, we had to keep in mind the concept of designing for happiness. During the whole elaboration of the concept, we knew that people experience a release of endorphins after exercising, but that was not necessarily related to their happiness.
Therefore, the app was designed and catered for people who already had an interest for exercising but that where not very sure of how they could accomplish their goals. If we created something that would help them accomplish their goals through something they already like doing, then they would feel happiness at the end.
The whole process of designing the app was long and fun, we had to create wireframes, user journeys, storyboards, and prototypes to explain and basically, understand our concept. It was not easy to explain to the other members what we wanted to do and how it had to be displayed to create an engaging experience to the user.
In a brief and rough explanation of what we did, (and if someone wants to help us produce the app, please, contact me or any of the team members) the app is a service that provides a detailed calendar with sessions that are calculated based on the user’s preferred type of exercise, level of expertise, exercise location and lifestyle. Each session is explained with videos and guidance text. This educational content allows the user to understand what they must do and encourages them to work on their technique while doing the exercise.
The app guides the user step by step to their specific goal, helping them understand that it requires patience, discipline, and focus. The ultimate reward for the user is their happiness at achieving goals they set for themselves.
Everytime, I read that I feel this is the app that will make a difference in all the fitness apps out there, it’s ok to dream, but maybe someday it can be done.
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