As a part of an academic course, my teammates and I set out to scope out a problem space, identify solution and develop a business plan for our product. The skills I learnt out of this project were end to end design management - from market selection to formalizing a business strategy.

Through preliminary research we found that there is a gap between technology and fitness for children that engage both adults and children. And so the topic fell under the “blue ocean”, providing us with areas to explore and seek potential.

I started off by validating our idea through market research, conducted in-depth user research studies with children of various age groups and ethnicities, analyzed research data, ideated through sketches, established a design system for the product, built low-fidelity wireframes and finally prototyped the solution!

I conducted a qualitative user research study by interviewing the team of support engineers and fleet managers that regularly use the platform. I then redesigned the application, created low-fidelity prototypes which I then iterated on with the PMs. I ran user testing with 10 participants and incorporated the feedback to refine the design, resulting in an 80% satisfaction rate. Subsequently, I created a high-fidelity prototype.

User Surveys & Interviews →

Research Takeaways →

Defining the Problem →

Ideation →

Wireframes & Visual Design →

Usability Study →

Prototype →

Through market research we scoped out the design statement we were trying to tackle:

With the problem statement scoped out, we then set up an online survey for people to fill out with questions mainly targeted at understanding users' needs and pain points when engaging with their kids in physical activities. The survey gathered around 35 responses.

Some of the topics that we covered included: what kinds of physical activities parents engage in with their children, how often they use technology, etc.

Further, I conducted 12 in-depth interviews with a wide demographic of users. Participants included children, parents, caretakers, physical fitness experts, etc.

After primary research we began organizing our data points and insights from the surveys and interviews into an affinity map this then helped form a clear empathy mapping between the different users and their needs/goals.

We derived 9 personas from this exercise and used it as a reference for our product design phase. At this stage, we also noticed the need to further divide our target user group of children by age leading to separate personas that covered 4-9 year olds and 9-12 year olds.

Based on takeaways from research we brainstormed several ideas and prioritized our features into two categories:

Once we identified our design criteria we conducted a competitive analysis to map out the value that each of our competitors provide in the area that we identified as our design criteria. Some of the competitors in the gaming aspect included consoles like Wii and games like Pokemon Go while others like Fitbit and Garmin covered the fitness aspect.

I started ideating different designs by running through a few rough sketches. This helped brainstorm our thoughts freely without constraints. We narrowed down our designs to a physical component and a digital component. We ran through a few options for the physical component like a hula hoop vs a mat.

I designed a few initial wireframes capturing the core flows of the app. These wireframes were later used in the user testing phase to test out our product. And then I reiterated through the initial flows and incorporated feedback as noted in the testing section below.

We conducted some usability tests on the mid-fidelity wireframes with our target group of users i.e. parents as well as children.

Some of the feedback we received were:

We developed a design system for our app that inspired joy and playfulness. Our color scheme was built on the primary colors with yellow as the main color. We also chose to primarily design for mobile platforms.

This case study highlights the process of identifying a problem space, researching, and developing a product that bridges the gap between technology and fitness for children. Through extensive user research, feature prioritization, competitive analysis, ideation, wireframing, usability testing, and visual design, the team created a product that effectively engages both adults and children in physical activities.