TrekTracker
Team Members: Prachi Sangani, Tony Zhou, Akilesh Konda, Amay Bansal
Problem Solution & Overview
Walking is seen as a daily form of exercise and activity, and we decided to focus on how we might support people in aspects of walking that current use cases didn’t quite address. We did some preliminary research and found that walkers reported using neighborhood streets, malls, and parks for walking (Eyler et al. 2003). We realized that current walking apps were heavily focused on steps, and didn’t focus on other aspects of walking, such as visual representations, social connectivity, and detailed metrics. Therefore, our idea was to address this directly through our design research and see where our contribution could be in these areas.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
When we first started our design research, we were interested in exercise and habits as a whole. Since we wanted to see where opportunities might lie in these intersections, we chose to distribute online surveys as well as conduct a few interviews to capture a diverse demographic which would help us narrow down the specific issue we wanted to focus on. We distributed a questionnaire survey to online social media platforms such as Reddit, a graduate student focused Slack channel, and to friends and family. Although we tried to capture people from diverse age ranges and backgrounds, most of our survey participants ended up being young adults (N = 12).
Design Research Results and Themes
After conducting our design research, we discovered some key insights that drove our decision making process.
- Most people either use walking or resistance training as their primary form of exercise
- People are looking for a easy and efficient way to track their exercise
- Walking is used more as a way to destress and express creativity whereas resistance training is used more for muscle building and is generally seen as more of a chore.
Although we had a vague idea that these themes existed, validating them through our design research was impactful, and provided us with the confidence to start working on our idea. We decided to narrow our target demographic to people who used walking as their primary form of exercise, as we resonated with the theme of walking being used as a tool to destress and express creativity.
After narrowing down our user group, we conducted more interviews to figure out exactly what problems people are currently facing with walking tracking apps.
We realized that there were 3 points that are generally missing from walking apps:
- Detailed walking visualizations
- Social connectivity
- Walking metrics
After identifying these current gaps, our solution flowed from there.
Proposed Design
Our proposed app design attempts to have different views for users to interact with different features relevant to their walking goals and habits. We grouped these into a 1) map, 2) metrics, 3) social, and 4) Profile.
This is the first tab which contains a map view of your current neighbourhood. It also shows people near you who are also using our app. Under the map, it has locations that are yet to be discovered (potential spots to explore).
The second tab shows you metrics related to your previous walks. Various infographics include steps walked over multiple days, calories burned, miles walked, etc.
This screen serves to be an interactive way to view your own stats.
The Social screen contains a map view of the people nearby you who are also using the app. This serves as a page where you can interact with fellow walkers and join group chats, meetup, and make new friends!
Under the map view, there is a list of all the people on the map sorted by distance to you. By clicking on each one of them, you can send a message request and a chat log opens up once they accept your message.
This is the last tab which shows your profile. Things like your name, profile picture, account settings, terms and conditions, and location settings and preferences.
