No Excuse: A Workout Timer

The Task: Create a fitness timer all leveraging the Apple Watch capabilities

Team: UX / Visual Designer, Developer

My involvement: UX design, Research, Visual Design, Animation

The Brief

An iPhone app that facilitates workouts, by giving the end users the ability to create and edit their own by setting the time and workout order.

Requirements Gathering

To better understand the user requirements I talked to both casual and regular gym goers (our target audience), by interviewing them regarding their workout habits, and how they achieve their goals.

Further, I analysed how similar systems are approaching the subject.

Finally, I presented the findings and set up a workshop to gather the business requirements.

Concepts & Wireframes

Having taken the target audience's input into account I started conceptualising the way the app could work. I used an established gym workout metaphor; the workout cards.

After further conversations with gym goers and a few iterations later, I designed the initial wireframes and prototyped the interactions in Keynote, to communicate the desired outcome.

Linking it all together

The wireframes were tested with the target audience and the ones that prevailed, were placed on the user journey and were connected together.

Animations

Animations and micro-interactions are essential to the user experience. I ensured that the animations that were used are meaningful. For instance, in this app's case, some of the animations helped to give navigational awareness 

Sound Design

From the interviews and user testing it was evident that the target audience is not looking at their phone while exercising. They are, however, almost all of them listening to music using their head/earphones. For that reason, we decided to add audio feedback for the workout screen. Having experience in composing music, I produced the required files in Logic Pro X.

The Visual Design

I researched the "powerful" fonts and colours, appropriate for the workout, looking into workout and health magazines, and gym apps and equipment preferred typefaces. I filtered the results by what would look best on both the interface and the iPhone screen (our target device).

I used Sketch and produced the icons, designs, visual palette and style to give to development.

The Apple Watch

Something that kept coming up during our target audience interviews, was that of those who had the Apple Watch, all of them were mainly using it as an exercise device. For that reason, we decided to add Watch support. 

We wanted to do it right, so we ensured the Apple Watch not only can be used as a standalone watch app, without the need to carry the iPhone as well, but also sync perfectly during the workout to provide accurate results.