Tuesday session

Report back

This week, we reported our progress to the teaching team and saw what other teams were doing at that moment. I saw some team were already working on the prototype which encouraged us to move forward. Also, I would like to get some suggestions or feedback from the teaching team after the stand-up session rather than just talk.

Methods for discovery

This session is quite interesting to me. First, we used Miro as a collaborative tool to explore specific content, this worked well with so many people being involved. And I think our team should also use this tool to discover our domain. Second, we reviewed some traditional research methods like observation in a new way, which we might not do in-person / co-located user research for discovery or evaluation. The alternative way is using online tools like we can do interviews through Zoom, Skype, etc, and the course activity was doing observation through a YouTube video. These changes of methods were trying to give us alternative approaches considering the current isolated situation and allowed us to conduct a study in a different way. Also, we are informed about giving people information about our study when we are doing online requests, this helps them to be familiar with our study and reduce concerns about privacy or any other safety issues. Overall, I think this section is quite inspiring for our project's research.

Breaking down the project

In this section, we were taught to map out our project by using the Miro board through 3 steps. These effects will help us to dive into our project and find new inspirations. Our group hasn't used this method to break down our project. But we will do this lately.

Thursday workshop

This section was about a general tutorial of Arduino Kit, which I have already done in last semester's DECO7230. Now I'll wait for the Auxiliary Kit for some components we might use in our project, during this time, I'll keep practicing Arduino through online tutorials.

Next step

In the previous stage of literature review, I focused on fitness motivation and found a useful evaluation method called Sport Motivation Scale (SMS) (Pelletier et al., 1995). The reason I did this background research is to find an approach to know more about our target audience through previous studies. The next stage is to use this method, adapt it to our project and to discover what could be the best motivations for our target audience to engage in our product. I will use this scale to evaluate participants’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in user testing sessions, analyze the result and define key factors to do exercise. This could help our team to design specific features that would attract our users and adherence behaviors.

As for the product’s delivery, I’m in charge of the data input section. The previous data input form is through a pressure sensor. After the pitch and consultation, we got some new inspirations about using mobile phone’s sensors like gravity sensor and gyroscope sensor, combined with fitness equipment to capture data. Another potential resource is heart rate. So, I will discover whether these can be achieved in our project construction process.