Digital Me
What motivates people to engage with wearable devices and perhaps develops a longer relationship with it?
Digital Me is a virtual pet app applying gamification to increase users’ motivation for using self-tracking devices. It visualizes users’ quantified data in a new and interactive way, helping users to recall past events.
Intro
Digital Me increases motivation for using self-tracking devices and defines a new mutual relationship between wearables and people. Digital Me allows users to interact with a virtual pet, watch it grow and unlock customizable features, creating a fun personalized experience when using their Fitbit. Using personal data, such as heart rate, sleep quality and steps, users are able to create and raise their virtual monster. In other words, the appearance of the virtual pet is the visualization of user's’ data. Healthy lifestyle and communication are the key elements to maintain a healthy relationship. In this way, users who help their monsters evolve into unique shape can also understand their life patterns better.
two Fun facts
During my study in ITP, I am interested in tracking and analyzing personal data. In one of my previous projects, I visualize the data of my browsing history for 102 days. Different color represents different websites. The green color represent google, while the red color represents baidu. The graph’s color changes rapidly because I was in China at first. And in china we couldn’t use google. After this project, i realized how powerful data is. It helps me recall past events by analyzing data.
Based on this project, I decided to continue explore how to use more personal data to help people better understand themselves. Then I start to use fitbit as the devices to capture my personal data.
According to my experiment, fitbit data is highly correlated to a user’s life events. For example, the image shows my heart rate during my first thesis presentation. I was so nervous at the time and my heart rates jumps to 158 which breaks a new record.
However
However, through self-tracking devices provides us so many interesting data, I found that some of my friends give up using their fitness tracker after a while.
A survey of 6,223 adults in the US shows that one in ten consumers age 18 and over owns an activity tracker such as Jawbone and Fitbit. however, more than half of them no longer use it. And more than 30% of people stopped using it within six months.
User Research
1. Interview
In order to find out the reason, I talked to people who use different activity tracker and collected their feedback. I interviewed 10 people. Each interview lasts about 20 minutes. Through the interview, I learnt what's users' motivation and attitude for using activity tracker and see if they are satisfied about the result. Among 10 users, 9 of them stop using their wearable devices and here are some explanation and feedback from them.
2. Affinity Diagram
After gathered all the information, I used affinity diagram to help me organize and synthesize all the feedback and ideas. According to the information I consolidate on the Affinity Diagram, I found that a lot of people stop using their fitness trackers because it wasn’t telling much more than they already knew. Also, people don’t have to use fitness trackers if they want to see some data like their steps. They could use an app to do the same thing.
3. Design insight
In other word, users don’t have enough motivation to continue using wearable devices. So my goal for thesis is to find a way to increase Fitbit's value as well as increasing users' motivation for using Fitbit.
There are 3 design insight I learn from the research. The first one is: fitness improvement is not a strong motivation for all the users. because not everyone goes to gym every week. The second one is: body data do help people to recall memory. But there is no applications in the market that correlate diary with personal data. The third one is the most interesting one. There is a girl mentions that wearing a self-tracking device is somehow like living with a friend. because the device know all your little secret by sensing your body data.
That gives me a new inspiration. Usually we treat wearable devices as a tool not as a friend. We have no emotional connection between users and the device so it’s easy for us to abandon the device. What if we can make wearable devices as a living creature?
* What is mutualism symbiosis ?
Interaction between two different organism living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both — mutual beneficial relationship. It makes sense to consider self-tracking devices for example fitbit as a living creature. because the sensor could be consider as eye as input, the app could be consider as mouth, the output. And the database working remotely could be considered as brain. All it needs is a concrete body to represent the system.
Also by visualizing data as a living creature provides a fun game experience for users.
Pitch Solution
My solution is to combine virtual pet and self-tracking devices together. Users generate and raise a virtual pet by their data. They could have conversation, their memory list, customized appearance and users can share the virtual pet with friends.
1. Main Features
2. Main Steps and App Map
After figure out the main function of the app. I went into detail to determine the main feature of the app. And draw all the main step and app map.
Storyboard
1. Lily generates her companion COCO based on her heart rate, her sleep quality and her steps. The visual pet is unique because everyone’s bio data is slightly different. The virtual pet has energy point and experience point. Lily can interact with it by chatting and playing.
2. Most importantly, Coco will evolve according to Lily’s status. The direction of evolution depends on the user. For example, If Lily loves sports, Coco will brow stronger. For data diary part. It capture your objective bio data, and you can enter your subjective diary data.
3. When the visual pet Coco notice that Lily’s heart rate is really high at some point. It’ll ask her what happened during that time at night. In a way of conversation. I called it ‘diary data’. The conversation helps to grow the relationship. It also help the virtual pet to live a healthier life.
4. After gathering all the bio data and diary data. Coco helps lily to generate her data story so that Lily can easily remember what’s the interesting moment in her life. What does her data mean in an interesting way.
Prototyping
The app synchronize the fitbit api, and use the data to generate the virtual pet. All the conversation data would be saved in MongoDB and display to the users.
1. First round paper sketch
2. Second round sketch and paper clickable wireframe.
3. Hi-Fi Prototype
4. User Testing
5. Iteration design
First of all, the game’s not time-consuming. you could use any your spare time to play and have a little conversation with the virtual pet. Secondly, it’s not forcing you to change your behavior. It’s a reflection your behavior. And it helps to store your memory based on personal data. Thirdly, unlike most of the app that only analyze steps, my project analyze more body data. Users can also customized their threshold to personal preferences.
