Goodlife Health Clubs Exercise assistant mobile app
A project by Cohen Aitken Gomes
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening! My name is Cohen Aitken-Gomes and I am a digital design student studying at Curtin University’s Bentley campus.
In our ever changing world we are faced with more and more difficulties and hurdles in our day to day lives, resulting in immense amounts of stress and anxiety on our bodies and minds. Taking care of both our physical and mental health has never been more important, putting our well being at the forefront of priorities to be the best versions of ourselves that we can. Unfortunately due to the quantities of these ongoing external and internal stresses we are sidetracked from attacking the problems head on, finding solutions to combat these emotions and come out stronger on the other side.
I have been tasked with creating an application for GoodLife Health Clubs to work to solve problems facing rural Australian citizens who are suffering with obesity and depression. By creating 3 different design concepts to accompany contextual, aesthetic and accessible variations. Individuals who are overweight or obese, mixed with a lack of physical activity, is estimated to make up 9% of the total diseases in Australia (ESSA, 2019), I believe this stems from a lack of true knowledge of the importance of nutrition and the benefits of physical activity.
To achieve this objective I would have to engage in a design sprint, utilising each step to further my learning and understanding of the task at hand, steps including mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping and finally, testing.
During the mapping phase I would need to establish an understanding of the project with its current and future goals. Subjects such as why am I doing this project? Where to be in 6 months to a year from now? How could it fail? Also further sprint questions that I will need to address. I found asking these questions were very beneficial in the long run of designing to know what aspects of layout and functionality I needed to focus on and what aspects weren’t relevant to the overall goal of the new application.
I decided to focus on three main aspects that I believe to make up the ground for a change to a more healthy lifestyle. Focusing on the areas of diet, exercise and mental health. All proven to lift mood, improve sleep and increase energy levels, as much as 30 minutes of exercise, 3 days a week is enough to bring vast changes to achieve a healthier lifestyle (Rimer J, Dwan K, Lawlor DA, 2012). Exercise is difficult and uncomfortable, but it is important to start simple, gain an understanding and experience slow improvement to work towards a goal. Making a plan and setting goals is an idea I really need to incorporate, it’s important to possess goals because it creates a pathway to stick too and a means for motivation. In all my sketches I started off with constructing the ‘Choose your Goal’ frame, working to alter the alignment, curve and colour scheme of layer elements to achieve the overall user experience I am aiming for.
In relation to context I kept the layout as basic and readable as possible to cater for a larger audience, sticking with the colour scheme of blue and black for the client. With a variety of real life visual imagery to enhance user engagement. I used white space and proximity to immolate less clutter on the screen, this making it easy to interpret and follow. Introducing the aspects of diet was key to help in the overall purpose of the application, to make it easy to monitor diet and understanding of nutrition through a scanning technology to monitor calories of the food you consume. Diet is key (Covington, 2017), it holds a higher priority of exercise in the long run, diet will alter moods and energy levels depending on what is consumed throughout your daily intake, even a reminder of remembering to drink adequate amounts of water is vital for overall health.
Aesthetic proved an opportunity to use saturated colours and drop shadows to create an overall artistic yet elegant feel to the design. Using contour bias with shapes to eliminate sharp edges, proximity and space to create less clutter on the screen. After researching into how Firefox did followed their design procedure i decided to utilise small illustration/iconography to give life to the pages but also act as visual descriptive language to what the options on the application were.
Lastly focusing on Accessibility, utilising global contextual actions such as visual narration that helps users with button prompts using highlights, tapping on an image to make it larger and portray a short description of the image displayed. Contrasting colours to make aspects more visually clear and readable to users who are visually impaired, utilising font adjustments for users who need larger fonts to read. Additions of instant audio narration when scanning food, giving verbal explanation to what has been found and the nutritional value it possesses.
Being aware of the importance proper nutrition and fitness can have on both your mental and physical health is astounding. I believe with an extra push to learn and educate users on the changes that can be made will result in a brighter and healthier future for all users of the GoodLife Health Clubs application.
Thank you for your time,
Stay healthy and stay safe,
Kind regards,
Cohen Aitken-Gomes.
