My role
UX Designer/ Researcher
Illustrator/ Project Manager
Timeline
August - December, 2023
Team members
Xiaokun Qian
Sisi Chen
Qilin Li
01. Project Overview
Active Garden
Lack of physical activity is associated with higher risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and many other health conditions. Today, only half of the U.S. adult population meet the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s guideline of a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week. Specifically work professionals tend to be sitting for a long time. As a solution, we created Active Garden, a cross platform gamified app that is paired with wearable device to motivate work professionals to move around and stay active both at work and outside of work hours.
User Interviews
02. Define the Problem
What are the challenges for work professionals to stay active?
We conducted 9 interviews with University of Michigan School of Information staff and faculty members who currently identify themselves as physically inactive to understand some current challenges of staying active.
Key Findings
1. Forget to stand up and move around: they often need to stay focused at work.
2. Lack of motivation: only get up and move around for a particular reason. (e.g. to grab lunch, use bathroom etc.)
3. Time constraints: work professionals, especially those who have young kids, are busy and they typically don’t have structured exercise built into their daily lives.
4. Incidental activities to keep active: performing must-do things is how people stay active, like shopping for groceries, walking a dog, accompanying kids.
Summaries
To sum up, forget to stand up, lack of motivation, time constraints are the top three challenges for work professionals to stay active.
How might we motivate work professionals to stand up and move more?
03. Solution
Active Garden
We created a gamified behavior change app that is paired with wearable device to motivate work professionals to stay active and move around.
Feature 01
Remind to stand up
The more the user sits, the more slouchy the stem goes. User can help the slouchy flower go straight and healthy again by just standing up and moving around!
Feature 02
Complete weekly move goal to make the flower bloom
The flower stage is associated with users progress towards the weekly physical activity goal based on the CDC guideline. Once the user completes the goal, the flower goes full bloom.
Feature 03
Send vibration to turn incidental activities into physical activities
Detect user's location and send vibration to users on how to stay active. e.g. in parking lot, the wearable will send user vibration to follow for faster steps.
Informed by Research Findings
04. Ideation
How did we come up with this solution?
From the user interviews, we found doing those must-to-do things like shopping for grocery is typically how busy work professionals stay active. So how do we turn these into moderate-intensity physical activities?
Work professionals might experience burnout at work. Therefore, we want to create a fun and playful solution. Research shows gamification can have a positive impact for health.
Generative AI
We asked ChatGPT what are some gamified ideas that can symbolize user's journey to stay active and be motivating.
Three options:
1. Growing flowers
2. Hiking a mountain
3. Building an island
Inspiration
Breakaway (Ambient Design by Carnegie Mellon University )
Final Pitch
Growing flowers is the best as it has the nurturing component and symbolic meaning to motivate to stay active. The slouchy stem is intuitive and can be used to visualize user's sitting behavior.
Challenges
05. Low-fi Prototype
Time to get the ideas down!
One of the challenges with gamification is it is difficult to associate the gamified component with user's behavior to stay active. We thought about watering the flower, removing weeds as rewards when users are active, we tested the ideas with 5 users. We got the feedback that they don't want to spend a lot of mental energy to THINK what these means.
Iterations
To make it as visually intuitive as possible, we decide to use:
Make flower bloom = when users make progress towards 150 mins/ week goal of physical activity
Make slouchy flower go straight = Stand up and move around
06. Hi-fi Prototype
Okay, let’s get real!
Well, this is a behavioral change app, so we want to make sure there are strong behavioral science behind it to make behavioral change work.
Key Screens 01: Dashboard
A reward system is used as a positive reinforcement to motivate the users to stay active. By standing up and move around, users get the flower straight. By completing the weekly goal (e.g. 150 mins/week), users make the flower bloom. Also, we encourage users to evenly distribute their physical activity to each day (22 mins/ day), they get a bonus seed to grow a new type of flower if they complete their daily goal 5 days in a week. By default, users grow the same type of flower.
Key Screens 02: Goal Setting
Key Screens 03: Feedback
Science shows, if you set a goal at the beginning, you are more likely to commit to it. The system helps user tailor their goal based on past physical activity data. And the goal is adjustable based on their actual progress.
The system provides users with feedback and summary for their weekly performance and advice for next steps. A blooming flower will be placed into their garden once the user completes their weekly goal.
Key Screens 04: Data Share
To provide location-appropriate, time-sensitive haptic instructions and help users tailor their goal, the app needs access to user's calendar, location and past physical activity data and also needs to be paired with a wearable device.
Key Screens 05: Wearable Inferface
Users can simply glance at their watch to know if they need to stand up and how close they are to their weekly move goal. Haptic feedback will be sent to users like "follow the vibrate to walk faster" once the system detects good opportunity for some moderate-intensity activities, for example in the parking lot.
Unimplemented Design
07. Reflection & Next Steps
What are the things we didn't implement and what comes next?
Initially, we had planned to include a leader board that includes other users’ goal completion status. We later didn’t implement this design as we feel this is too evaluative and too extrinsically motivated.
Next Steps
1. System prompts users to make plans for those activities in the morning based on their calendar. Therefore users have more ownership and planning for those activities to takeplace.
2. Develop a desktop extension to remind users to stand up as often users stay focused on their computer screen.
3. we may consider more concrete guidance on what to do when users stand up during the workday.
4. Add a social support feature, where users' success can be shared with friends and family to foster a support group.
08. Reference
Research and theories reviewed
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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services(2018). Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services(2022), Healthy People 2030 Leading Health Indicators. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Wilms, P.,Schröder, J., Reer, R., & Scheit, L. (2022).
The Impact of "Home Office" Work on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior during theCOVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(19), 12344. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912344