Project Proposal
Healthy aging is a valuable goal for everyone to achieve, our group also want to contribute to it. As health problems are the most serious factors that affecting elderly people’s quality of life, we want to create this application to motivate people to exercise and improve their physical function to increase lifespan in old age. SportsLife is a mobile application that can motivate people to continue with their own workout plan regularly through four basic functions. These functions include workout planner, workout routine selection, workout result sharing & ranking and reminders, they are designed based on the background information we have gathered, and the theories of behavior change. This report is divided into five parts to describe the project clearly. In the domain/problem part, we will introduce the domain background, and the effective ways to change behavior. In the concept part, we will identify each function and the target users of the application in detail. After that, we will also discuss our weekly work plan which can help us stay organized while working on this project during this semester. In addition, we will introduce each member of the team and do the SCORE analyze of the project.
Healthy aging is a hot topic in today’s society, the meaning of healthy aging is “have the opportunity to live a long and healthy life” as well as “developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age” (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018). With the number of older people rising rapidly, healthy aging is not just a personal issue but also a public issue should be paid attention to, it has an important impact on social welfare and economic development. From our previous research in this area, disease is the most important factor that influences the quality of life of older people, especially chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Thus, we want to provide them a pleasant motivation to exercise by using this application, so that helps them access to more exercise opportunities and increase more preventative health options.
In today’s modern society, convenient technologies make people get used to staying at home, the busy life of students and young people also make them do not have enough time to exercise and lack of outdoor activities. However, this kind of phenomenon also leads to an increase in the obesity rate. Compared with the obesity rate of Australians in 1995, this data increased by 49 percent to 27.9% until 2015(Heart Foundation, 2015). Based on the definition provided by the Australian Institution of Health and Welfare (AIHW, 2017), it means that there is 27.9 percent of Australians whose BMI is above 30 in 2015. Obesity is an important problem in public health and related to many kinds of diseases, it is also the problem that our group wants to address.
As obesity is always a public health problem in Australia, and there is a strong relationship between it and health. Our group wants to create a mobile application that can motivate people to do exercise. On the one hand, exercise is an effective way for people to lose weight. On the other hand, exercise can bring many benefits to people other than controlling weight, such as it can help people to release pressure, build self-esteem and have a better appearance (Strelan and Hargreaves, 2005), these benefits are great for people's mental health. Furthermore, for older people, doing exercise can help them to avoid Alzheimer's disease, except these, exercise also is good for children’s brain development especially for memory and learning ability (Telford et al, 2012). Thus, our group wants to help people to keep healthy and achieve healthy aging by encouraging people to do exercise.
Overall, healthy aging is a valuable concept in aging society and it’s important to contribute to it by helping people to prevent disease. As the high rates of chronic disease is a social phenomenon in Australia and other countries, it is also related to many kinds of diseases that are affecting older people’s life quality, the purpose of the concept is to encourage people to exercise in order to avoid preventable diseases. Doing exercise can bring more benefits to people although young people are not old yet, they can be healthier and achieve healthy aging if they start to do it earlier.
As we all know, changing behavior is a long-term challenge, people may give up for a variety of reasons. In order to help people change their unhealthy lifestyle to achieve healthy aging, we have done some research on the factors that help people change their behavior and summarized as follows:
- Knowledge
- Social motivation
- pioneer
- structural motivation
- Feedback
- Preparation before next behavior
Capturing relevant knowledge for their behavior changing can have a better understanding of the impact of changing behavior and make plans. Many people lack health knowledge and awareness of healthy aging, so it is important to raise awareness about healthy aging at first and help them assess their health’s situation.
Social motivation refers to the fact that people are influenced by the words and actions of those around them, such as family and friends. In changing behavior, people should receive more positive information and try to avoid negative information. From behaviorist B. F. Skinner proposes the learning theory that individuals learn by imitating the actions of others. At this stage, the person doing the same thing will often give you positive feedback and encourage you to keep doing it.
If you want to accomplish something you've never done, you should be willing to find someone who has done it. The feedback from the pioneer is positive for people at this point, because they have successfully changed themselves and they can be the target of other people. In addition, after people successfully change their behavior, they can also act as pioneers to influence more people, which has a positive impact.
Structural motivation refers to the use of reasonable structural design to encourage changes in the behavior. According to B. F. Skinner’s theory, rewards are essential program to ensure repetitive behavior. Set small goals that are easy to achieve and reward people for reaching them. These rewards can be rewards for merely making progress, or they can be rewarded for achieving goals. The biggest advantage of the rewards program is can further motivate user behavior and encourage them to keep doing.
It is essential that give feedback to people once they complete a task. Quality feedback shows people's progress about how they perform their tasks and achieve their goals. Showing the progression of their progress and giving affirmation is a great way to encourage them. Similarly, positive feedback has a positive impact on people so that it increases their self-confidence and makes them more motivated.
In addition, it is necessary to prepare for the plan ahead, people will be highly motivated about that. If a mobile application has a planning function that involves establishing goals, users can arrange the plan in logical order.
To sum up, these factors play an important role in changing people's behavior, so we take these aspects into consideration and add new details and functions to concept design.
In order to help people change their exercise behavior and mitigate the aging problem, the concept of SportsLife has been created. This concept is purposed to motivate and remind users to do daily exercise and keep their workouts interesting. In general, users can collect daily workout data and connect their social media to share score. By using API, that can collect the workout data from system and on the basis of data to showing push technology in mobile system to remind users to do exercise. Also, through API to connect social media, that can share the workout data with users' social media friends to view exercise rating and get encouragement from friends to achieve their health goals.
This mobile application has four main functions for users to change their sporting behavior. The first function is workout planner, the application can calculate the BMI (Body Mass Index) from users' personal health record, and different BMI value needs different workout plan, users can use SportsLife to make their own workout plan through their BMI value and workout needs. At the same time, the application can detect workout automatically in order to let users know their personal daily exercise data. The second function is workout routine selection, there are many professional workout plans are already done for different type of user needs in the application, users can choose one of them to achieve their workout aim, for example, weight loss workout plan, muscle building workout plan and so on. The third function is workout result sharing & ranking, users can share their workout data with friends, both social media friends and other registered users who also use this application, also they can communicate with friends to share their workout experience and show off their results. Moreover, depending on the shared data, there are two different ways of ranking to provide a positive competitive situation to motivate users to keep their interesting. One is daily workout data, users can see their friends’ daily workout data and the ranking. Another is the ranking of earning "points". Users can get points after they finishing their daily plan, redeem a certain amount of points for some gifts that is also a useful and positive psychology method to motivate users to earn points. The last function is reminders, through the application to get the data from daily exercise. The pushing technology is used to remind users of their selected plan or someone’s rank is above him/her or someone wants to challenge him/her exercise data. In addition, when the daily workout data less than the standard amount, the application will push the reminder message to remind users to keep doing daily sports. AR (Augmented Reality) technology is considered to be used in our application, it’s aiming to make users more touch the interaction patterns with their friends when they do sports, because this is creating a situation for doing sports with their friends together which can increase interests in sports.
The social aspect of our concept is through sharing and coordinating workout data with friends to let users do exercise together and motivate other users to keep doing sports when they are influenced by peer pressure. By sharing personal workout data in the application, users can do some social activities and communication. Also, users can share their sports experience and useful sports method in the application for other users to study and discuss together. In terms of psychological, showing off personal performance is a good way to increase app usage. This application provides a useful platform for users to exchange healthy life experience and share sports skills. In terms of ranking function, users are stimulated a competitive spirit. By checking the ranking position can encourage users to have a sense of comparison. Also, the positive competitive can help people achieve their workout target and enhance the relationship with friends.
This application will gather users' workout data from the system, and through the data detection technology to check whether the daily plan is finished or not, so that users can know their daily workout state, and from different needs to make workout plan. Furthermore, push messages are sent according to the various detection data. If the detection data is less than the minimum standard data, the pushing message will be sent by the system which can remind users to do sports in order to achieve their workout target. Moreover, the application is through using the API to share their workout data on social media platforms, SportsLife can be connected with other popular social media platforms to share their scores, and also users could invite their friends to download this application after they receive an invitation.
Making plan is an effective way to form habits as changing habitual behavior is one of the most difficult things. In addition, through the previous research, BMI is an intuitionistic data that provides an estimate of total body fat and the risk of developing weight-related diseases. Nowadays, young people prefer to stay at home have rest rather than to do indoor or outdoor sports, it leads to most young people get a high BMI and result a high percentage of obesity. In order to help users to find their BMI directly and make young people has a sense of crisis about their health problems, the application provides a BMI calculator function for users. After the application detecting and calculating users' BMI, user can make personal suitable sports plan or choose the professional fitness plan depend on their understanding of BMI. Workout routine selection and detection are both effective functions to motivate users to change their behavior. Having a good sports behavior can make young people keep their health youth and achieve healthy aging.
Overall, this concept is aiming to help users to change their sports behavior through some valuable functions, and the goal is having a healthy and scientific sports plan.
Our target audience is people who want to build personal exercise plan and change their exercise behavior or people who want to detect their daily sports state but lack motivation. This application is aiming to achieve healthy aging and create a social platform for users to keep doing exercise.
There are lots of existing fitness applications already, most of them are too informative and having too many functions to users, for example, log workouts, count calories, collect states about runs, walks, and bike rides. These applications are more focused on the individual workout, they are less focused on the social aspect for users to communicate with other people who are also doing sports. Furthermore, these applications are lacking psychological hint, which means users cannot receive meaningful and emotional push messages for system. It seems like the application is just an application, lack of emotional factors may result in loss of user motivation. In comparison with these informative applications, our concept is more purposeful to directly give users motivation. Through the different functions to provide a useful platform for users to exercise with friends and make this application as a disguised sports social media platform.
Many areas of social and mobile computing theories are applied to make this application more professional and usable.
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Communication: Users can use this application to communicate with other users. By using SportsLife, users can share their results with other registered users and send an internal or external message to connect with other social media platform users.
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Collaboration: Application users and the application developer working collaboration is helpful to make the application build a better environment for maximizing the app utilization. Users need to update their personal health information, such as height and weight, this allows application to calculate BMI and provide suitable plan for users.
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Social interactivity: Motivate users to change their sports behavior by the pressure from friends ranking and encourage users to do sports together. That is connecting with the social computing in this application.
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Portability: The application can gather users' daily workout data by using API, the application can build the workout data ranking with users' registered friends, from the ranking that can stimulate users' positive compete. Moreover, the application can connect with other social media platforms through the platform APl to invite more friends.
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Individuality: The technology is applicable to individual needs, users can make their personal workout plan to achieve their personal sports goal and changing their personal sports behavior.
During the Requirements Phase, the tasks that were previously identified in research phase are redefined and further analyzed and tested into high-level application requirements that define the function in more detail in terms of user needs, processes and application feedback. The information acquired at this phase will have a serious impact on the plan for the Design Phase. Detailed requirements are derived from detailed feedback from users, this requires us to collect more data from different ways. For our project, in order to motivate people to participate in sports, and understand how to motivate them effectively, we think interviews and questionnaires are a good way to start. Through interviews and surveys of people who want to exercise but fail to take action, the feedback we gathered is able to give us valuable information about how to create an effective application.
The Design Phase seeks to describe all the functionality of the application in a correct and coordinated way. From the analysis of Requirements Phase, we can understand user needs and conducting requirements of the application, the feedback should be reflected in the Design Phase. This phase will be broken down into low-fidelity prototype and refined prototype based on testing session. During the Design Phase, the style guide is applied in each necessary component which is followed design principles. This requires us to use uniform colors, fonts and typography to present high-level design of the application. In addition, according to the information acquired in this phase, we will redefine the plan for future work. Since we have a good understanding of whether each component is suitable for this application and users, we will start to create and test low-fidelity prototype.
The Prototype Phase seeks to gain insights into an application creating process. In order to discover any problems, this method provides cheap and scaled down version of the application. Based on the research of Design Phase, we should have created the low-fidelity prototype already, during this phase, we will test it by observing user interaction and taking detailed notes on their behavior. Because the application is designed to motivate people to exercise, we want to get users' feedback about the function of the application so that we can make it more attractive and functional. As perceived in our research, most existing applications do not have an effective function to encourage people to exercise, we want to focus on testing this function from low-fidelity prototype, and also make some colors, fonts and typography changes based on user feedback.
The Evaluation Phase during the Prototype Phase implementation may examine whether the tasks are successfully achieving its intended goal. This phase can be used to implement mid-course corrections to application and shed light on implementation processed. The Evaluation Phase can be divided into testing and test analyzing session. The main purpose of testing is to determine whether the prototype meets user requirements. There are some specific items need to be tested, for example, function, icons, and task flows. The next phase is to analyse the test results from user behavior of the test.
The Iteration and Evaluation Phase is a particular implementation of prototype that focuses on integrated and comprehensive progress, which then progressively gains more comprehensive functionality until the final application is complete. The concept of incremental development is a common method of iteration, this method allows incremental alteration changes in each new iteration phase. In this application, we will drill down and document each iteration model, including how the process is actually implemented within the application, and both the advantages and disadvantages that can arise from its use.
During the Final Prototype Phase, we should complete high-fidelity prototype which can interact with users effectively. In order to measure human interaction, this prototype can be done by design software, this including Illustrators, Photoshop, Sketch and InVision. This prototype should quite close to the final application and simulate all the features and details, the UX and UI is a high-fidelity design. After testing the final product prototype, we should gather user feedback and evaluate whether the application meets user experience goals. If there is any change in the tasks, this phase should be combined with the iteration phase, and retest the new iteration product. For our project, each interface should follow the task flow which is based on user’s habitual behavior. The purpose of prototype testing is to test whether the motivational function can encourage people to do exercise. For the interface, it should appear on corresponding pages when the button is pressed.
Ruoran Zhao - Study in Bachelor of multimedia design and interested in the marketing area. She has a flexible idea for concept and is skilled at UI and UX design. She has flexible time to do works and can record the message on time and give valuable suggestions for the project. She can finish her individual separated work on time, and she hopes the concept is good for use. However, she is weak with the academic research. In concept proposal, she is work on creating the main concept idea and collecting all team members’ idea to make the concept more useful and complete.
Yuchen Zhou - Study in Bachelor of Information Technology and major in UX design, he is also interested in networking, so he studied many networking and information security courses. He does not have any very outstanding skills, but he also thinks he does not have any obvious weakness. In this semester, he wants to improve his UX design abilities especially the ability of prototyping and communicate more with other people.
Ye Yu - Study in Master of Interaction Design. She has studied Graphic Design for her bachelor's degree for 4 years, so she familiar with design software, for example, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign. She has a better understanding of prototype creating. However, she is not good at critical thinking about a project or paper.
Fan Yu - Study in Bachelor of Information Technology and major in user experience. Although he is not good at programming, he has many flexible and innovative ideas in design. He is also keen on thinking about new things and providing suggestions for improvement. During this semester, he devotes himself to improving his ability about generating ideas and participating in group work to improve his communication skills.
Opportunities/Risks:
- What opportunities present themselves?
- What risks arise from with those opportunities?
- What opportunities arise from those apparent risks?
In recent years, healthy aging has become a hot social topic. Due to advanced science and technology, people's lifestyle is becoming more and more convenient, so many people have problems such as sitting for a long time, irregular life and lack of exercise. However, people all want to live a long and healthy life. We saw this opportunity and designed our concept. We chose to create an app to respond to this social phenomenon and encourage people to exercise actively by taking advantage of their sense of competition and the expectation of a healthy body. We'll create a leaderboard feature that allows users to compare themselves to others and motivate them to exercise. However, this can lead to some risks. Because we want to use the leaderboard to encourage people to do exercises, if the people are very ambitious, he will do excessive exercise, which in turn can cause damage to the body. At the same time, users can improve the interaction with their friends to do daily sports to increase the interaction of this application.
Strengths/Services:
- What would we regard as our strength?
- What services and capabilities do we have?
- What services can we call on from others?
On the basis of both health and healthy aging are popular topics, an obvious strength of us is that the application which is related to these topics could attract users easier, and because exercise can bring benefits to everybody’s health, the group of our target user also will be very large. The second, because there are several exercise applications already exist, we can learn the success experience such as how to attract users from them and avoid some problems they have met. Furthermore, the functions of “ranking list” and “Share to social media” both are certified as effective ways to encourage users to finish tasks in most of the game applications, however, there is not any exist sports application have these functions. Moreover, our application through API linked to social media platform for users share their workout and communicate with other users. Thus, we think these functions in our application will be our strength.
In our group, there are two people achieved high grades in the course of graphic design, and there is also another people is familiar with user experience design. Their knowledge and skills also are our advantages to finishing this concept. On the other hand, all of us are international students, it is an advantage for us to communicate, every people speak English very slowly and every other people can understand. If we are a group combined with international and local students, usually it will be hard for international students to follow the local students’ discussion. The last strength of our group is that a people of us love exercises very much and she has been using fitness applications for a long time and she also has ideas about which kind features ca take her good user experience, furthermore, she knows where can we find our target users.
Challenges/Constraints/Capabilities needed:
- What are the issues we need to address? – within the organisation? – in relationships with partners, suppliers, other stakeholders?
- What holds us back?
- What would constrain us to prevent any needed change?
- How will we resolve or work around those constraints?
- What new capabilities and services would we need?
- What skills would be required?
- What would be needed to develop these skills and services?
In the process of our research, we found some obstacles and problems we might encounter. For example, if our users lack friends, the leaderboard function may not suit for them. As our theme is to achieve healthy aging, this leads to the need to differentiate between different age groups. When we design the functions of the app, we hope that users can share their exercise experiences in the social software, which can not only share the joy of exercise but also encourage more people to use our app. But for international students, Facebook may not be their mainstream social software. If our app can only share experiences with a few social apps, it may cause a loss of users. These are the challenges we are facing and the problems we will need to solve.
Within our group, the group structure of us is our disadvantage when it is also our advantage. Because none of us is native speaker of English, it is probable that we cannot express our thoughts fluently to other partners, and if the texture appeared on our application has grammar mistakes or unsuitable words, it will make our users confused. Thus, we think good English writing and communication skills are the capabilities we need.
Responses/Regulations:
- What responses would we expect from other stakeholders? from customers? competitors? providers? partners?
- What regulations might arise in response to our strategy?
- What would be the impacts of new or upcoming legislation?
We hope to get feedback from users about the use of our APP, especially whether there is a feeling of being motivated to do exercise as we expect when using it. In addition, do users have an overly competitive idea because of the function of leaderboard. We think that's very important, and that's one of the things that we think about when we design our app, and that's one of the risks. Of course, it would be nice if users could give us suggestions on features since users are the most vocal group.
In our group, divergences of opinion may be a hindrance to some extent, but this will not affect our cooperation. This circumstance has happened not long ago, we have agreed on the general direction, but we have different views on the details. After much discussion and exchange of views, we decided on the final choice. We believe that this situation may also arise in the future, so in order to unify our views and increase efficiency, we have decided to fully discuss and use the voting mechanism to select the most appropriate resolution. In addition, language is one of our weaknesses, and mistakes in grammar can drag us down. So we decided to check each other's writing, find out the grammatical mistakes with grammar checking software such as “grammars”, and minimize the effect of these problems.
Effectiveness:
- Is it efficient?
To work effectively, we decided to follow our plan firmly and communicate frequently. The working progress of every round should be "research - prototype - analysis - refine the concept", we will record and document what we did during the process. If conflicts appear, we will execute the method we have introduced in "team contract" to solve the conflict to avoid extra time will be wasted. To achieve our team goal, we will meet once a week to improve the work efficiently. Good working direction and methods could make work effective and more efficient, the plan we have confirmed is based on the research we have done the information we have collected, we believe it is reasonable and reliable.
Australian Institution of Health and Welfare, AIHW. (2018). Overweight & obesity. Retrieved from: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports-statistics/behaviours-risk-factors/overweight-obesity/overview
Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. (2015). The Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity. Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html
Heart Foundation. (2015). Overweight and obesity statistics. Retrieved from: https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/about-us/what-we-do/heart-disease-in-australia/overweight-and-obesity-statistics
Strelan, P., & Hargreaves, D. (2005). Reasons for exercise and body esteem: Men’s responses to self-objectification. Sex Roles, 53(7-8), 495-503. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-7137-5
Telford, R. D., PhD., Cunningham, R. B., M.S., Fitzgerald, R., PhD., Olive, L. S., B.S., Prosser, L., PhD., Jiang, X., PhD., & Telford, R. M., B.S. (2012). Physical education, obesity, and academic achievement: A 2-year longitudinal investigation of Australian elementary school children. American Journal of Public Health, 102(2), 368-374. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/963359538?accountid=130654
World Health Organization. (2018). What is healthy aging?. Retrieved from: http://www.who.int/ageing/healthy-ageing/en/.
Colin,R.(2014,December 1). 6 Factors That Influence Our Behavior. Willpowered Evolution. Retrieved December 1,2018, from http://www.willpowered.co/learn/factors-of-behavior-influence