Discovering health and fitness behaviors
Broken up into a series of research efforts the ultimate goal of this project is to create a product that fills a need in people's health and fitness behaviors.
Goals of the first phase of research are mainly based on problem discovery. This means defining target groups of users and discovering goals, behaviors, needs, or tasks to tackle within these groups. What motivates these people, why do they do certain things, why do they have this goal over another?
Results of this phase of research include :
1. Refined user personas with user goals, motivations, needs, etc.
2. Discovering a set of focused behaviors, needs, or tasks to narrow and focus the scope of research in Phase 2.
3. Preliminary planning for Phase 2 of research.
Starting with a survey
Using Google Consumer Survey 60 participants were assessed to gather preliminary information on consumers in regards to their health, personal health engagement, demographics, and skills with web based technology.
Results of the survey aided in the creation of preliminary personas, topics/behaviors of interest, rough user needs, and product directions. Preliminary survey personas were then used to identify people for one-on-one interview sessions. To see the full report with: analysis, methodology, personas, data, and questions please click on the button bellow.
Summary of survey findings
Preliminary personas
Rough user needs & product directions
1. Cross platform distribution of product(s)
2. Provide engaging content to educate users on various health and fitness topics.
3. Help users achieve health and fitness goals through behavioral change: cheating, incentives, etc.
One-on-one user interviews
After identifying 3 rough user personas I found 10 participants to interview that aligned with those personas. Goals of the user interview research were:
1. Gathering info on each user to refine the user personas each individual relates to.
2. Collecting info on user behaviors, thoughts, goals, etc to identify a target group of behaviors to focus on in Phase 2 of research.
Interviewing each participant one-on-one I focused on questions that would help me to understand their current behaviors, thoughts, environments, and the underlying motivations. Consequently this meant a lot of asking "Why". Why did you do this? Why is this important to you? Why choose this? Why did this make you feel this way?
Each interview was recorded (with consent) and consisted of 4 main parts: an introduction, a focus on health and fitness behaviors, goals/road blocks, and a closing. To view my interview script please click on the button bellow.
Interview analysis
To help me analyze the interview results, I created an affinity diagram. I choose this method of analysis for its ability to uncover similarities among problems from multiple groups, and give boundaries to a problem.
Grouping the findings
After each interview I listened back to the recordings and picked out key phrases that represented people's behaviors, motivations, goals, context, and thoughts. Written on post-it-notes, I tagged each sticky with the participants name and color coded them by user group. After writing everything out I organized the findings into the following categories:
1. Schedule & context
2. Personal info
3. Behaviors & tasks
4. Thoughts, feelings, & motivations
5. Goals
6. Roadblocks
(Yellow = User group A; Blue = User group B; Pink = User group C)
Organizing the interview findings by category
Creating the affinity diagram
After grouping each sticky into categories, I then tagged each sticky with their category and reorganized them by grouping like things together. For example every schedule, behavior, thoughts, goals, etc sticky that related to the gym was grouped together. This affinity diagram exposed the major themes that occurred in these three user groups, helping to identify areas for further study in Phase 2. In this way, direction for Phase 2 of research is justified by the findings in Phase 1.
Major themes revealed:
1. The gym
2. Diet & nutrition
3. Miscellaneous physical activity (not at the gym.)
4. Physical and mental health
5. Work
6. Goals
7. Leftover miscellaneous
The affinity diagram
Example of a user thought written on a post-it. Tagged with their name and category
Next steps
Hold tight theres more to come I promise! I'm currently in the middle of analyzing the interview results and will be posting them here shortly...so please check back! In the mean time feel free to view some of my other work here.