UFit: A deeper look into finding friends on campus to exercise with and stay healthy!

By Tad Grindeland, Camden Foucht, and Aaron Meheret

Problem and Solution Overview

As newly independent adults, many college students take it upon themselves to become more active and physically fit. This life decision is an important part of staying healthy, but for many, is difficult to accomplish without someone to workout with. Exercising can prevent excess weight gain and help maintain weight loss. It can improve health conditions such as heart disease and high blood pressure. Physical activity can stimulate various brain chemicals that leave you feeling happier and more relaxed. When we workout with others, it keeps us motivated and encourages us to push ourselves further leading to better performance and results. It’s also easier to try new exercises with someone else as they encourage you to try exercises or adventures outside of your comfort zone. Having a gym buddy who is counting on you to show up pushes you to be more consistent so you don’t let them down. While there are a multitude of benefits that come from exercising with a friend, it can be difficult for college freshmen or transfer students to find a workout partner who shares the same interests and goals and who has a compatible schedule. This leaves some college students new to their campus lacking exercise motivation and accountability without a partner to encourage them and keep them in check.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

We conducted surveys and interviews to gain insight into how college students new to their campus exercise with their peers. We wanted to find out about things like how often students frequent the gym, their motivation for working out, how they feel about exercising with others, and discovering if they have an interest in a tool for finding a gym buddy. With this information, we could determine if our problem was a real issue college students face, and could give us insights on how to create a possible solution. We focused on freshmen and transfers because as a new student, it can be difficult to meet new people. Freshmen are already tasked with making the transition from high school, so meeting someone with similar exercise interests may be difficult. For transfer students, it is often hard to make new friends when it seems as if everyone on campus already has friends. We chose to conduct surveys as a way of quickly assessing a wide range of our target audience and gaging their problems in this area. In order to complement our survey data, we conducted interviews with a select few within our user groups to understand more deeply about their personal stories and struggles and/or successes with finding exercise partners. This helped us gather personal anecdotes and delve into the emotions and experiences of our users.

Design Research Results and Themes

We noticed in our survey results that a lot of students use recreational sports to exercise. Some of these activities include basketball, soccer, ultimate frisbee, and martial arts. Students enjoy playing a game like soccer over working out at the gym because they get to talk and socialize with a group of friends and they find it more fun than weightlifting. They also mentioned that the IMA is too crowded which deters them from working out there. One of the difficulties with these group activities is that it can be difficult to plan times to play with preorganized groups as students often get busy throughout the quarter with midterms and finals. Many respondents were interested in a feature that would find friends for sports rather than a single person to workout with.

Our survey results also showed that students who exercise with others find that it gives them a better workout and helps them stay consistent in their training. Having someone depending on them helps keep them motivated even when they feel like skipping that day. They also like the socialization aspect of getting to workout and catch up with their friends. Survey respondents showed that they may not want to meet with a stranger via an app as they would like to workout with someone they know, although one freshman that we interviewed expressed interest in meeting someone with his exercise interest, as that’s where he had met a lot of the friends he’s already made. Participants who workout alone said it was too much work to coordinate workout times with others.

One common theme amongst our interviewees was how going to the UW IMA for the first time brought upon some anxiety. Being new to campus, they talked about the uneasiness surrounding going to a gym that they weren’t familiar with. They described how going and working out with others made them feel much more comfortable. This demonstrates another benefit of having a workout partner. Whether it’s attending a new gym for the first time or even beginning to exercise for the first time, having someone to go through the experience with you or walk you through the process makes it a lot easier.

Multiple interviewees also mentioned how they either needed friends to teach them how to workout or want someone who could help them learn. Many people begin to exercise regularly or seek a consistent workout plan when they enter college. As a freshman, it can be difficult to begin an exercise routine without someone to teach/guide you. One interviewee mentioned that he resorted to looking up YouTube videos on specific exercises in the middle of his workout in order to ensure he was doing it correctly. Another even said that he wanted to start lifting weights but hadn’t begun yet since he didn’t have someone to teach him.

Proposed Design

Our research showed that college students try to squeeze exercise in any way they can, and they prefer to do this in social settings. Students face difficulties staying motivated when exercising alone, and we found that many students like to play sports to get their exercise, but many find it difficult to find gym partners or groups for sports. Given these needs, our proposed solution is a student discovery app that allows for students to search for sports, fitness activities, and more and allow them to form connections with other students, or create groups where they can connect with several students to help organize their favorite exercise activities.

Joe finds a connection with Jim and organizes a workout plan

This first storyboard walks through the user experience of using our proposed solution to workout with a gym partner. It shows a student who is busy all day but still wants to be able to exercise in the evening. He uses our app to quickly connect with one of his gym buddies and coordinate their exercise. The app gives them a healthy dinner suggestion and they are able to compare their workout progress, promoting competitive growth. This shows how there is a lot more that goes into the exercise partner relationship beyond just the workout.

Tom organizes a basketball meetup

This second storyboard shows the user interactions of the group feature of the application which is most helpful in organizing sport meetups. Users can create groups for a specific sport like basketball and create a post describing possible meetup times, skill levels and more. After getting enough users to join Tom’s group, he meets his new friends at the basketball court and plays a friendly game. This low-fidelity storyboard demonstrates the experience a user can have when using our proposed solution. Meeting others is a difficult part in any adult’s life and our app will alleviate some of this pain so our users can be healthier and happier.

We are excited to be able to help college students create new social connections and encourage them to exercise even with hectic lives. By conducting user research, we have learned a lot about how we can take our ideas and create a usable solution. Thank you for reading this blog post about UFit!