How can technology motivate university students to stay active?
Team
Gabriele Pifferi
Andrea Moscara
Time
1 month - team creation & ideation, 5 days - sprint
2 months - polishing
Methods
UX design, Secondary research, User personas, Prototyping, User journey
Tools
Figma
[ tl;dr ]
Problem
University campuses have a large amount of sports facilities that are not sufficiently used by its students, remaining empty most of the time. In addition, a lot of university students lead a sedentary lifestyle, lacking motivation to stay active: busy schedules and the excessive use of technology leaves people with less time to focus on health and socialising with others, particularly if someone is not already sportsy.
Solution
Putting students' technology usage to good use: a mobile app to help people find others to workout, try out new sports and organize fitness activities with using university sports facilities. The social aspect of the app can encourage students to pursue a healthier lifestyle, turning fitness into a fun activity rather than a chore.
The Process
Context
This project was done within the TechFit Challenge offered by ECIU university. Being part of an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme, the work consisted of a preliminary online component and the main in-person component hosted by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
During the online part of the challenge, all of the students from various countries (Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy) were divided into groups based on the idea they wanted to pursue. Our team consisted of 3 HCI students from University of Trento (myself, Gabriele Pifferi and Andrea Moscara) and 2 Computer Science students from Hamburg University of Technology. However, further on into the process our ideas started to diverge, and the project ended up being completed in a team of three HCI students.
In the 5 days of in-person work, our team had to develop a prototype, present it to other teams and craft the final presentation by combining the solutions of all of the various teams together. Finally, all of the ideas were presented to the stakeholders as a possible solution to their problem.
Stakeholders
Physical Activity Service (SAF) located in Autonomous University of Barcelona &
Uni Trento Sport, located in University of Trento
presenting our solution to the panel of judges at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
our group of students from University of Trento at the Autonomous University of Barcelona after finishing the challenge
Understand the needs
Both University of Trento (UniTn) and Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) have made attempts to encourage healthy lifestyle among their students. For example, UniTn created a program called "Sport Diffuso" ("Sport for All"): they installed sports equipment like ping pong tables and exercise bikes throughout the university buildings to encourage students to take active breaks. Meanwhile, UAB has made it possible for its students to validate physical activity participation as academic credits, using sports to fullfill graduation requirements. However, the universities are constantly on a lookout to make physical activity even more accessible to its students.
Based on our research, out of the total of around 30,628 students at UAB, only 5,800 are subscribed to the sports service – less than 20% of the total population. In addition, out of all sports centre users (including staff), more than half (53.8%) are using the fitness room only, despite the university having 30,000m2 of facilities available for use, from the swimming pool to the padel courts. As a result, the fitness room is often crowded, whereas the other facilities remain underutilized, wasting university's resources.
Gabriele, Andrea and I have previously worked on a research project on Fitness Motivation Through Community, so our hypothesis was, once again, that community involvement may serve as an incentive to be active, and, as a result, to use sports facilities. In addition, we were aware of WhatsApp groups for UniTn international and exchange students with sub-groups such as "Volleyball Enthusiasts", "Runners of Trento" and so on. In these groupds, students could find others to play or workout with, choose the date and location for the next game and so on. A lot of students we knew found it a nice way to meet new people, as well as do a sport they liked in an informal manner.
However, this solution had a lot of issues: for instance, it promoted social exclusion – the group did not contain the whole student population, and one could only get access to the chat via an invite from someone already in the group. Next, planning a game in a chat could be confusing – it was sometimes hard to find information on which field the group was meeting at, at what date and time, and so on, not to mention that newly invited members could not see any of the previous messages sent in the chat.
Identify the problem
Although our findings revealed that social interactions increases the participants' willingnesss to do physical activity, we decided to explore gamification as a way to make the users more engaged with our application. To do so, we used the Bartle's taxonomy of player types3, which was originally created for video game design but is now used to introduce gamification in other fields in UX design:
Bartle’s Player Types for Gamification
Killers: highly competitive, like to win, want to be the best, but what motivates them the most is seeing others lose
Achievers: competitive, like to collect points and win badges, want to display their achievements to others
Socializers: collaborative, like to socialize and interact with others
Explorers: like to try new things and discover hidden aspects, such as "Easter Eggs"
Moreover, we discussed the different perspectives with which people may view physical activity: for instance, one can be competitive and want to improve, whereas another may do it to meet new friends or have fun. And, of course, each person has a certain skill level in each sport they practice, which can also affect other players.
Considering our learnings, we came up with 3 user personas:
User Personas
Goals:
Find a fun activity
Make new friends
Gamification Aspects:
Comments
Chat
Social interaction tools
Bartle Type:
Socializer
Fitness Level:
Beginner
Marco is a sedentary university student. He has been studying at UAB for several months but he is struggling with finding new friends, as well as staying active (he knows physical activity is good for him, but he has not found a type of activity that he would like to stick to). He realizes that he spends most of his time in the library alone instead of getting new experiences, and decides to change that by doing group sports together with other university students.
Goals:
Find a fitness buddy
Improve together
Gamification Aspects:
Badges
Share achievements
Bartle Type:
Achiever
Fitness Level:
Advanced
Leah is a Master’s student at UAB who leads a very active lifestyle. She has been going to the gym, hiking and running but realized she wants to try doing some of these activities together with someone to motivate each other and get better results.
Goals:
Try new types of activities
See new places
Gamification Aspects:
Unique badges
Easter eggs
Bartle Type:
Explorer
Fitness Level:
Intermediate
Anna is very outgoing and friendly. She just started attending UAB and she is very excited to try everything, including different types of physical activities: from running and rock climbing to volleyball and other team sports. Moreover, she likes exploring new places (be it through running a new route or simply playing on a different field) and meeting new people. She tends to get bored quickly from doing the same thing, so variety is very important to her.
Ideate a solution
We decided to leverage the students' use of technology (mobile phones in particular) and create a mobile application meant to connect students who want to practice sports with each other. In the app, a student would be able to look either for a Sport Buddy (a person to work out with consistently at a predetermined time each week), or for people to join them for a One-Time Activity, such as a volleyball game or a hike.
The app would include gamification aspects catered to each type of the Bartle's Player types:
Killers
Achievers
Socializers
Explorers
Moreover, taking into consideration that not every user has the same workout goal and level in the sport they want to participate in, we came up with a 2 scales: Competitiveness (Casual, Moderate, and Competitive) and Expertise (Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Professional). This way, users can immediately state their preferences for each specific workout type to avoid mismatch in player types on the field and, overall, a better match between people who want to work out together.
Initial Sketches
initial sketches of the app included to overall look of the future application: the different pages the app would have and the navigation tabs at the bottom. At first we actually had 3 different scales for user classification: the two we decided to implement plus the level of "outgoing"-ness or "intravertness vs extravertness". In the end, the latter was removed since we realized it wasn't relevant (if a user wants to workout with someone, they can't really say they aren't open to socialization - it defeats the purpose of the app).
User Journey
Next, a user flow was created to better show how a user can reach certain parts of the application.
Prototype
Home screen
The homepage features two tabs: Activities and Sport Buddies. In the first one, the user can browse one-time activities proposed by other users. The most important information is displayed within the card itself, and further details can be accessed by clicking on one of the cards.
The same principle is applied in the second tab, where the user can view the posted searches for a sport buddy - a person to regularly workout with. Once the card is opened, the user can request to participate in an activity (or request to become a sport buddy)
Creating an activity
By tapping the Plus button in the middle of the menu, the user can choose to create a new activity or a post an announcement searching for new sport buddy. For each of these tasks, there is a different edit screen that prompts the user to type in the needed details for each post, such as the maximum amount of participants for the New Activity post and the Availability Calendar for the Sport Buddy post.
Friends page
Because the app's primary focus is socialization, the users are able to chat within the app, as well as search for people to add them as friends. This facilitates the creation of new posts, letting the user add their friends to an activity prior to posting it to the wider audience.
Statistics page
This page is dedicated for Achievers and Killers: it shows the leaderboard for each sport the user participates in, as well as the user's personal stats in them and their achievements (including "Easter Egg" achievements).
Profile page
A user's profile page is what appears to other users when searching for people. Here, the user can choose to display certain achievements, add sports tags to display which sports they participate in, and add their Competitiveness and Expertise levels for each sport.
Conclusions
What would we do differently?
Of course, we would have started by involving the user into the design by conducting some primary research, such as interviewing our peers or using questionnaires to get feedback from a bigger demographic. We would also seek better insights from the stakeholders, such as UAB and UniTn to understand university's needs with regards to the application. That would help our team understand the constraints that the university has in terms of both physical aspects of the sports facilities and digital aspects of a university-run platform made for its students.
Next time we would also give more thought to the platform on which we want our application to be -- for instance, a web application might have worked for this solution as well.
What did I learn?
This activity once again demonstrated me the intricacies of communicating with Software Engineers. As an ex-developer myself, I already knew how hard it can be to convince technical people to consider the user's needs. So, when our teammates studying Computer Science suggested developing a website in a week without being able to answer the questions like "Why this exact website? Would anyone use it? Do people need it?", the HCI part of our team had to push heavily for further research of the problem and a proper development of a possible solution.
Later on we ended up separating our team into two separate units to avoid disagreements, which wouldn't have been possible in the real world. This is a consideration for the future - learning to work through disagreements and compromise for the sake of the project instead of avoiding the conflict and sticking to separate projects is an important skill in the professional environment.
Next steps
The app would benefit from some user testing to understand its flaws. Of course, some of the aspects of the app were not fully done due to the time constraints: the profile page and statistics page can be improved to elevate the application design. An onboarding process for new users can also be added to explain some aspects of the application, like the tags and "experience" and "competitiveness" levels.
Moreover, we were told that University of Trento did, in fact, consider making a similar app for its sports facilities, so working together with our institution can provide some real-world feedback and generate a bigger impact.
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