A Better Running Experience

During an interview in 2017 I was asked to critique an application I was familiar with. I decided to review the Garmin app, since I used it on a daily basis to record my morning runs. What turned started out as a a simple question towards the end of the critique, "What feature would you add" turned into a case study. 

I started off documenting my morning run. Sometimes getting up for a run is just second nature, so I wanted to document all of the events involved. I wanted to avoid getting, too, technical in the beginning with a hierarchal task analysis, so I made a simple infographic to visually represent my morning. This process allowed me to critically think about where the pains points were for me in my own experience using the appliation.

Once I had my own pain points to use as a starting point, I wanted to expand my knowledge about what other users experienced with their own fitness tracking applications. I conducted unstructured interviews of friends and family and made sure to include users coming from all across the fitness and running spectrum. The quantitative data is shown below:

Personas

To help me analyze the data I gathered from these interviews I created three personas. These personas were able to help me narrow down the focus of the different problems these user groups faced. Based on my initial pain point assessment I knew that a majority of "Competitors" would experience some of the same issues. I decided to focus on this user group and solve the need for competitive runners to easily document training notes within the same application they store their runs. 

On my next run, I documented the task of syncing my running information to the watch and included how the user would interact with the added feature. I made two task flows, one for users who would want to docuement any training notes immediately after a run, and one for users who might need to wait to cocument any training notes in the app.