This was a course project taught by professor Marty Seigel in Interaction Design Practice I. We were asked to design a “sticky” iPhone application for WeightWatchers users.

After a first round of discussion, we decided our target user group to be the intersection of WeightWatchers user group and iPhone user group. We hoped the design will make more iPhone users become WeightWatchers users.

From WeightWatchers online, we found out that there were “four pillars” in WeightWatchers' science-based approach, which were food, exercise, supportive atmosphere and behavior. Among these four pillars, we realized that the food pillar took more weight than others in terms of food plans. The weekly meetings provided the supportive atmosphere and aimed to positively change WeightWatchers users' behavior. After the exploration, we decided to focus our design on the exercise pillar. We believed the truth that weight control is always based on the balance of calorie-in and calories-out. If one wants to lose weight, he has to burn more than he eats, which is the most positive and direct solution. So the challenge was to figure out why people don't exercise and how to motivate them to.

From our interviews with the WeightWatchers users, we got two major insights about exercise:

• Tracking workouts is time-consuming.

Most existing tools for exercise tracking require some manual input, which is not intuitive enough and a little bit time-consuming for this kind of task, let alone tracking with pencil and paper.

• Exercise results are hard to see in a short term.

Theoretically, how long it took to gain some weight and thus how long it will take to lose those weight. The sucess of losing weight is the result of the accumulation of persistent efforts. It is hard to see how much progress one makes in a short time, like a day, which is one of the reasons why so many people get frustrated and give up half the way.

We found that aerobic exercise is the best type of exercise for weight loss, and walking as a common aerobic exercise has the lowest barrier as it is easy to do and maintain. Also we found that moderate exercise plays an important role in a weight loss plan and the key in weight losss efforts is to move more, not necessarily faster or harder. So we decided to design for a better walking experience.

Being inspired by one of the participants in the interviews, we chose one of our design goals to be affecting people in such a way, for instance, that one would like to stop his car at the far end of the parking lot in order to do more walking. To meet this challenge, we need to achieve 1) to make tracking of walking easy and fun; 2) to make small exercise progress obvious and motivating.

One problem with the common walking tracking tool -- the pedometers is that it only shows the number of steps, which doesn’t help much in assessing the progress. People need to make meaning from the data, to see the comparisons and to get the motivations. So we started to brainstorm around our goals as well as to think about how to position the design into a working system.

From our brainstorming sessions, we came up with two metaphors for our design concept--the heart and the feet. We tried to translate the "boring" data into interesting and engaging graphics that convey meanings to people. We used the heart metaphor to represent the health status, and we used the feet diagram to visualize progress the user has made during a period of time frame.

One could set a goal for a day, and a blank feet diagram will be generated. As the user walks more during the day, the blank feet diagram will be filled up with colors to indicate the progress. The idea behind these two symbol metaphors was that the heart would build a connection with the user to reflect on how well he did on walking for a period of time, and the feet diagram was the visual representation for "work-in-progress" or "achievement so far".

As a system, there are other design components of the design:

Graph: For the scalability of the data visulization, there are line graphs to show the progress over a long period of time.

My status: The status page displays the necessary information of the exercise data, and serves as the user’s main reference to their daily activities.

Calendar: Through which, the user could select to see the walking status in a specific day, month or year.

We did three scenario-based usability tests.

We got many positive feedback from the usability tests. One participant said that she really liked the glowing heart, which she could imagine that it cheers her up everyday morning and she will be motivated to do the walking to make the heart look better. Another participant said that she liked the feet diagram for it’s interesting to see it when walking. One thing we changed to the glowing heart symbol, according to one WeightWatchers user, was to make it only show the normal and good health status without bad ones, in order to just provide positive feedback to the users.