What is WoofieRun?

How does it work?

Process.

What steps we’ve been through?

Motivation.

Why do we design WoofieRun?

Study Results.

What have we learned?

Formative studies: Survey and diary study

The goal of the study at this stage is to understand what pain points our target users are currently experiencing when trying to maintain a running habit, as well as what motivate them to run. We created a survey to reach a wider range of target audiences and catch the overall trend and common thoughts people are having, while also conducted a diary study to get more enriched details.

Major Pain Points

➡️Click here to see full study results

Idea Testing.

What features should we include and why?

Based on the understanding of the users, we then went through brainstorming and ideation, and finally narrowed down our idea to the current “AR dog” solution. We decided to test our ideas through user enactments since we wish to refine our concepts further to ensure our product suits the needs of the users perfectly. We want to find out how users would potentially react to the specific features we proposed, and reveal the problem and concern that users may encounter in real-world scenarios.

We hope to conduct our user enactments by addressing the following research questions:

• In what ways do users want to build a running habit with AR Dog?

• To what extent should AR dogs provide reminders, guidance, directions, and incentives to help users cultivate their running habits?

• How would target users like to interact with the AR dog?

• What should be different when users are at different stages of building the running habit or encounter different situations?

➡️Click here to see full scripts of user enactments

After analyzing findings from our user enactments, we came up with a set of design criteria that includes what users value the most. We went through each feature and rated them based on the criteria to decide on our final features.

Product Architecture.

How does the high-level interaction look like?

Reflection.

💡Limitation of current technology

Due to the fact that the AR technology is still developing and evolving, our concept still seems not practical from a technical perspective. Also, we were not able to test our ideas through IoT prototyping techniques using photons or other particles.

💡Accessibility

The major features of WoofieRun rely a lot on both audio and visual feedback to provide immersive experiences to the users, however, these audio and visual elements are not accessible to hearing or vision impaired users. The UI components appear in AR glasses during running may also be hard to identify due to limited contrast of color under strong sunlight.

💡The gamification system

Gamification is a very complex topic. A game system involves elements like scores, badges, levels, leaderboards, random events and their possibilities, community interactions, etc. Due to the limited time and the focus of this course, we proposed a rough gamification system. Given more time, we would further envision the system and iterate as the system goes on and users become advanced. For example, Woofie gets stronger as the user sticks to their running schedule, interact/compete with friends (leaderboard).