Under Armour now has a community of over 120 million people logging health and fitness data as a result of purchasing the MyFitness suite of data collection apps. What will Under Armour do with all this data? How do they build loyalty to the UA brand, gear, apps and wearable fitness technology? Our UX team answered these questions by creating a data aggregation tool for UA called "Perform" featuring an app, website, and wearable device. Ultimately, Americans need to get healthier and there is plenty of technology available to help them do this. One in five Americans own a wearable device. For those who don't, it can be overwhelming making the “right” choice among the many apps and devices available. We wanted all users of our product to be able to monitor all of their health and fitness data in one place, regardless of device or software.
We wanted Under Armour to provide a platform for people to become healthier, not just the clothes to do it in. Under Armour Perform does this by aggregating the data from ANY device and presenting it in an easily understood interface (for both web, a mobile app, and a wearable) while also providing a social network for a personalized level of support from your own fitness community.
discovery phase - how can technology help people be healthier?
Background research revealed that Under Armour's CEO, Kevin Plank's vision for the company is for it to be the owner of fitness and health data - and that he is sincerely interested in helping Americans be healthier. I also researched the current state of wearables and fitness tracking in the country, while comparing that to overall health and fitness stats and some of the leading causes of health-related fatalities. Our competitive analysis showed us that not many apps were offering all that we intended to accomplish - to make Under Armour stand out, we needed to embrace our competitors for the information they gathered and the devices they sold, not attempt to beat them.
Surveys and interviews
We conducted a survey about fitness tracking and social media with random users from SurveyMonkey and friends and acquaintances who already do some form of fitness tracking. We came away from this research with three personas- serious fitness fanatic, casual user, and someone who has little to no interest in setting goals through fitness tracking (maybe they were gifted the wearable by a friend). I highlighted attitudes towards social media and the sharing of personal fitness or health tracking in our results to gain a better understanding of people's attitudes towards their health data.
SKETCHING AND IDEATION
On the app, someone should be able to see their health stats for the day in one place- and that app should be device agnostic, so a user can see information from various sources and it won’t matter if UA's device provided that data. We considered various features like being able to use current technology that would give you health data by “reading” facial information or digital fabric that would allow a t-shirt to have a digital interface - this led us to creating the "Gauntlet" sleeve. We also considered how our app could be used by medical professionals in future iterations.
PRIVACY CONCERNS
We learned very quickly from our surveys that privacy was a major concern. Our users wanted to be able to customize the level of privacy for their health tracking. For some, it was very important for that information to be completely confidential, though they still wanted to be able to track it digitally. Others wanted to share with certain people, or to their Facebook wall. We addressed this issue by allowing users to set specific data as private or only shared with certain people (perhaps a running buddy or nutritionist). For those extremely active users who use social media to motivate, there is a feature to share publicly, .
Prototype and Testing
We created three different prototypes- web, mobile, and wearable. I was responsible for the web prototype. We conducted testing that showed us we needed to clarify icons and navigation, but that the overall "Pinterest" style board setup was easily understood. This prototype walks through the user journey of one of our personas reading her health data and setting up a new board to track inspiration and progress.
Snapshots of the prototypes for our partnered app and the wearable device are seen below. Though we all had input and feedback in these devices, my teammates were responsible for the creation of these prototypes.
