Fit First is a running shoe store that helps their customers with their expert shoe knowledge and coaching them in their weekly running club clinic. However, the club has members of all different skill levels who express different levels of commitment and personal goals that encourage them to exercise with the group.

We began research with this client by interviewing the club organizer, different levels of participants in the run club, and observation while participating in the club activities ourselves. With initial research done we created three personas to guide the subsequent steps of our design process and formally presented our findings to our peers.

All three of these personas’ goals centered around how to motivate themselves (or their members in the case of the organizer) to run more often and keep improving their fitness. However pain points like lack of time, self-consciousness about their fitness, and physical pain keeps many members from reaching their goals. Despite this, most members returned each week because they loved their weekly activity with the club community. We realized our solution would need to capture positive elements of the social aspects that motivate members to encourage additional running outside of the group run.

To see how to encourage members to run more each week we filmed informance videos that helped us empathise with our users and had the run club members participate in cultural probes to help us gain more insight on what motivates them.

In the cultural probe (see pictures above) one of the activities was a relay baton used as a physical goal manifestation. Participants logged a running session they completed on their own and passed it onto another friend in the group to total up to a goal distance together. On post-activity interviews, three members who normally don’t complete homework runs achieved them and attributed the baton to helping keep them more motivated. This strongly guided us to our final design.

Our final solution is Track It: the FitFirst run club kiosk. Track It would be mounted on the sales counter of FitFirst, where it actively displays the stats of the run club community. The kiosk acts as a conversational piece to promote the run club, especially for people who are just visiting the store for the first time and through its sister web app, it would extend the sense of community that motivates members as all members strive towards a collective goal together.

During this project I learned and used new research methods conducting cultural probes and informance videos. From gathering and analyzing the data gathered, I gained a lot of experience identifying key user needs and keeping design work aligned with users' values and goals. I also became adept at representing my findings to share with others in weekly critiques using different mediums like print and video. Being able to articulate and share my findings and design process in so many forms will be a great asset in future collaborative projects.