Evaluation

Discount Evaluation

The prototype underwent a Discount Evaluation with four experts who completed set tasks within established user scenarios. The evaluators thought aloud and gave their candid feedback as they went through the prototype and scenarios. After the session, the evaluators completed the Survey below to share their impressions and experiences with the prototype.

Survey

We also used a survey to gauge effectiveness of the system in fulfilling our functional and non-functional requirements. Including, system “personality” and friendliness, usability, user experience, and usefulness of key components.

Results

Usability is not usage

Well-designed interfaces don’t necessarily correlate with motivation of consistent use. Encouraging people to exercise goes beyond visual design and UX principles: it requires people to change their behavior because of the system.

Our design was effective, but not as affective as we wanted

While the people we interviewed consistently said that our prototype was effective in helping them accomplish their goals, few mentioned that the process felt fun and engaging. One of our goals was to make our system feel fun and engaging, and the feedback we got wasn’t as unanimous as we had hoped.

Future Work

Incorporating personal trainers’ insights

Our work on this prototype thus far has exclusively focused on the perspective of the workout participants. Physical trainers would have insights into how to engage people working out, encouraging consistency, and avoiding physical injury while exercising unsupervised. There are also avenues for monetization: some users suggested letting users upload their own videos to the application, rather than publicly listing them on video streaming platforms, so personal trainers can use them for working out with clients over any distance.

Keeping things portable

We originally chose to pursue laptops and tablets because of their large screen real estate, higher processing power, and longer battery life. That being said, not all exercise takes place in a single room: outdoor cardio isn’t a good fit for this application, since it’s hard to move around with a tablet or laptop. To make our application mobile-friendly, we’d need to figure out how to create spontaneous synchronicity without burning through data plans and phone batteries.

Engaging people while they exercise

We want to make synchronous, spontaneous exercise more engaging than “watch a video and see your friends”. This could be through gamifying the live exercise experience, or maybe by adding a cooperative aspect to it, like creating obstacles that can be overcome if participants contribute towards a mutual milestone during their workout.