DIGITAL MEDIA - Interface Concept Development Task

'Your overall task is to propose and present a concept as part of a small group. The concept is to be a solution to a real-world problem that a digital media product could help solve.'  

·      Aim - Our aim is to create and interface for a new and up-and-coming application.
 

·      For this task we have chosen to create a ‘fitness’ app from the assigned subject areas

·      We aim to be innovative, interactive, informative and visually stimulating. 

  · When conducting our research for this project,  it became apparent just how many fitness and fitness related applications the market had to offer. With an abundance of both free and paid material there was an overwhelming issue of choice for the consumer. From this we found our problem 'real- world problem' that required a solution. The wealth of fitness apps now clouding up our options is making it much hard for us to choose our ‘ultimate’ fitness application. As is commonly said 'less is more' and from this we wanted to make it our responsibility to help solve this problem by creating a new digital media product 
 

Creating the APP 

 ·     As an athlete myself, my personal experience has taught me that people don’t only apply themselves to one form of fitness, we can be involved in a number of activities from cardio/ running / swimming / cycling to yoga or weigh lifting, and the list goes on. However in our saturated market, there has failed to be an application that has tried to consider various areas. Yet to have an application for each activity of interest seems an inconvenience to the user.

We knew that our the idea at first seemed I little ambitious, but with a strong navigational system and lay out our product should work. The key is navigation! Encompassing this many activates of fitness within to one a plication format may seem over whelming to the users at first, but with a strong grid system in place the user will be able to travel around the app with easy, finding only what they need.

• ·      The second challenge - Our application needed to stand out amongst those already existing in the market for it to be a success. This was going to be a interesting task as so many existing named brands had already created an app, Nike, Nike + running, Speedo’s running app and many more.

• For this we needed to create a strong brand identity, memorable and eye-catching, with a constant theme that continues to feature throughout our app, considering font, style, layout and colour palate. 

Design – Flat design is one of many common design trends to take place at the moment. Flat design, the self-explanatory design, excluding embossing, shadows, and added texture. A great example of this would be the new IOS software for iPhone.

My role 

For this task I personally designed two of our pages, the first was a ‘tracker’ a simple method that allows the user to enter their fitness achievements according to time, and endurance.

These can be manually entered or synced with the users Google maps account for particular sports such as cycling, walking, running, etc However this can also be adapted to any of our other sports, eg, lengths swam / Time taken for the data to be entered manually

Although many apps already include a similar feature to this, I added an additional function to the page. In the bottom corner you can see a small symbol representing a graph, when the user selects this option their results are calculated in a mathematical format, which produces a graph thus creating a visual representative of their progress, average, speed/ time/ through out their week. These can then be compared with previous weeks graphs and future results so that user has a clear and visual representative of their progress apposed to a grid of numbers that show their results.

My second page, ‘Warm up’ a resource page that includes a highly interactive feature that allows the user to select parts of a virtual body. When done so the page fills up with optional stretches, and warm up routines for this particular, muscle, limb body or part that has been selected. If the user likes the sound of one of these activities they can click to select for a more detailed description and diagram of the warm up/ stretch, each of these activities will be tailored to the relevance of the exercise the user first chose from the opening selection menu, eg, swimming, cycling, running etc.  At the bottom of the page sits an additional panel which informs the user of the chosen body part, informing them of its use, and importance, with a brief description of how it works.