Innovation Challenge
Identify a problem or opportunity and design a solution to help people (or a community of people) keep, regain, or achieve optimum physical and/or mental health and fitness through active play or movement.
Problem/Opportunity
Exercising is a big part of staying active and being healthy. In our research, we found that people do not usually exercise due to a lack of motivation and enjoyment. Current activity and health planners do not work around time constraints, such as work or school. Many work out or exercise planners that are currently available tell the user which exercises to do, however these planners seem to work best for people who are already physically active. For people that do not already exercise, this does not provide adequate motivation. There are already many products that have motivating features, such as reminders to stand or walk a certain number of steps every hour, but these do not promote strenuous exercise. In addition, exercising for the recommended 30 minutes a day seems daunting and unenjoyable to those who currently do not exercise.
To get people exercising, we created a fitness website called Banana Splits. Banana Splits does not just track workouts; it also motivates users to exercise by breaking workouts into manageable chunks of time and making them fun for all fitness levels. We have designed a wide variety of workouts so that the user can choose a new routine each day, keeping them interested. From talking to physical therapists and trainers in our local area, we found the best ways for people to exercise. Our website combines informative pictures and a fun graphical user interface for an enjoyable user experience, which helps keep people engaged. We also connected with web developers who taught us about site organization and worked with us on ways to make the website user friendly. We have implemented leaderboards, badges, and other community-related activities to keep people involved, adding an exciting and competitive aspect to casual exercising. Banana Splits works to make exercising friendly, fun, and enjoyable, rather than dreaded and despised for all ages.
research conducted
The team sent out a survey asking members of the community what motivates and unmotivates them to complete a given task. This survey was conducted mainly through social media and was completed by over 400 community members. Some baseline questions were asked to get a general understanding of our audience such as age range and free time on a weekday or weekend basis, along with our main questions and the responses we were most interested in: what motivates you and what unmotivates you to complete daily tasks? Below you can see some of the results.
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We also reached out to professionals including physical therapists, trainers, web developers and website managers for additional information and insight into our proposed solution. Through all our conversations with these professionals, we were able to gain more knowledge about how to properly implement our ideas into a website that users would be able to enjoy using. We also used their advice to keep motivated to continue exercising on a regular basis.
technology used
Our team used Weebly.com to build the website and Adobe Creative Cloud for digital design. We decided to use a website builder as we wanted to be able to quickly and effectively portray how the design of the website would look. On Weebly, we used applications to create a backend data storage system, allowing us to keep track of user statistics, and create community connections. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects were used to create the graphics and animations on the website as they helped us make the website more appealing for the general audience.
