FIT POINTS
Inspiring people to get more physically active.
A concept platform to incentivise physical activities together with (new) friends or family.
02> FIT POINTS
Client: Manchester City Football Group
Established in May 2013, City Football Group is the owner of football-related businesses in major cities around the world, including football clubs - Manchester City FC in the Premier League, New York City Football Club and Melbourne City FC - academies, technical support and marketing companies.
Context
I was challenged to design a solution on how Manchester City Football Group can inspire people to get more physically active.
Project goals
- The main goal was to recognise and understand the obstacles of the inactive lifestyle and create a solution to tackle them;
- Intensify City FC's reputation in the community.
Solution
The solution was to create a digital platform to incentivise physical activities with (new) friends or family.
Team and my role
This project was done in collaboration with Victoria N., Pooja Vaidya, Marcos Arruda and Zeno Kapitein.
My role: UX Designer, UX Researcher
Timeframe
3 weeks - Manchester UK
Secondary Research
We spent multiple days performing desk research to generate insights around three related domains:
Manchester City
PARTNERS
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How do Manchester City FC’s commercial partners and current initiatives currently deal with-and tackle inactivity?
Health
COMPARISONS
-
Citizen health within Greater Manchester and in the UK, and comparisons to other countries (GMHSC, n.d.; Greater Manchester Moving, 2018).
Behavioural
MODELS
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Behavioural models and how to design for behaviour change (Kelly, 2020; Peters, Calvo and Ryan, 2018).
Numbers & Behaviours
GREATER MANCHESTER
27%
GM is significantly worse than the England average for inactivity across almost all age brackets, with 27.9% of women and 25.5% of men doing less than 30 minutes of physical activity a week.
CMO GUIDELINES
60%
6 out of 10 young people are not meeting the Chief Medical Officers guidelines for physical activity.
DAYS IN HOSPITAL
38%
Patients who are inactive have 38% more days in hospital, 5.5% more GP visits and 12% more nurse visits.
INACTIVE POPULATION
596,800
GM has a high level of inactive population – around 596,800 residents (26.8% of the population vs England average of 25.1%)
OBESITY
65%
While everyone would benefit from being more active every day, this is especially true in GM, with 65% of adults and 28% of children classified as overweight or obese.
ABSENTEEISM
-20%
Physical activity programmes at work can reduce absenteeism by up to 20% and on average physically active workers take 27% fewer sick days.
LACK OF TIME
Multiple interviewees indicated they did not have free time during their busy days.
“In time-poor families, much time needs to go to the family” - Kevin - 55 years old.
FAMILY RESPONSABILITY
It is a critical barrier, particularly for parents who put their children’s well-being first and sacrifice their activities and needs.
“I miss going to the gym; I stopped as soon as I had kids. I would like to go back eventually” - John - 42 years old.
THE NEED FOR CONNECTION
A desire for social sports (group activities) and for outdoor adventures.
“I don’t like to be alone during sports time”
Ruben - 38 years old.
Key Insights
IDEO Download
Just after each interview, our team downloaded all the information details, insights, quotes and impressions that emerged by applying the “download” canvas presented by IDEO.
Affinity Diagramming
The post-its from the downloads were then grouped together into meaningful clusters of insight via the process of affinity diagramming. These would become our key insights and directions for ideation.
Empathy Map
This method is notably beneficial for capturing behaviours and elaborating on user personas. Using this process, we could observe the “Hear” gap in our research and fix it.
Synthesis
02. Research Process
Timeline
The following timeline serves as a visual overview of the design research process.
Primary Research
This project required an in-depth understanding of the connection between people's behaviour and physical activity. Besides this, we wanted to validate our hypotheses and assumptions and generate insights through primary research.
These key insights and the brief lead us to find our problem statement:
How can parents integrate physical activity into their existing work-life/ balance?
We conclude that parents need to develop a regular schedule to provide and support their social connection with their children, and so the whole family can foster a healthier lifestyle.
Understanding the Context
The purpose of this design research project is to investigate, analyse, and identify key insights on how Manchester City Football Group can play an important role in inspiring people to get more physically active.
Then modelling clear and valid insights out of the research to create design solutions that will meet the client’s briefing.
Challenge
The challenge was to recognise and understand the obstacles of the inactive lifestyle and create a solution to tackle them.
38% of Manchester residents are not active enough to benefit their health and has one of the lowest rates of activity of any region in the UK*.
* Based on the Greater Manchester Moving (Reducing Inactivity Across Greater Manchester, 2019).
Client Brief
The brief given to us focused on the prevailing lack of physical inactivity among the population of Greater Manchester. City FC believes they can encourage and support adults to get more physically active. The question posed to us was as follows:
“How might Manchester City Football Club motivate the most inactive Manchester residents to get fit and stay fit?”
01. Understanding the problem
Greater Manchester has one of the lowest rates of activity of any region in the UK.
Solution
A platform that not only challenges people but uses reward points as a way to help them gain confidence and encourage them to work out together.
The core of it is to stimulate parents to be more physically active and cultivate healthier behaviours with their family and friends. There is a massive opportunity for Manchester City Football Group to connect with Manchester residents and collect data to understand users’ profiles in a unique way.
It is a possibility to give them the power to decide among different activities, get fit and stay fit.
03. Design Research
Empathy was the key to developing this design research.
First, we had to empathise with the problem to establish what we already knew and what we would like to discover through the research. Secondly, we had to empathise with the users to understand our target, their needs, feelings, and what they want. It was an essential pathway to keep people in the centre of our research.
Behavioural Objective
Help busy parents to integrate an active lifestyle into their existing life/work balance.
Behavioural objectives are focused on a person’s actions and not on their feelings, perceptions or emotions. The Behavioural Objective finally made the abstract brief into a concrete design problem. We could now define who we were designing for, and what needed to change.
Using the archetype in brainstorming the Behavioural Objective
Archetypes
The brief pointed to a resource by London Sport detailing 7 archetypes of inactive people (London Sport, 2019). From these archetypes, we chose to focus on the so-called "Time Poor Integrators", as it seemed their "barrier to entry" was already relatively low, they "just" needed a way to more easily integrate physical activity into their lives. We decided to focus on parents with young children, as they seemed like the archetypical Time Poor Integrator.
Summary board of secondary research.
Drive Model
With the archetype in mind, we used the Drive Model, developed and provided to us by Designer Psychologist Lauren Kelly, to discover what were the main reasons that limit parents in Manchester to have a physical activity lifestyle. Many of the assumptions were centred around the problem of family life and professional duties detracting from the parents' time for relaxation and physical activity.
Time management, family commitments and work obligations were some hypotheses around what prevents them from being more active.
The design process was centred around empathy and was built on deep research with real people in their natural environments.
Guerrilla Interview
Guerrilla Interview is most effective for research especially when used at the beginning of a project. We used this method to clarify and improve what fields to explore more profoundly in this research. Our team did four short interviews around Manchester. It was a powerful approach to obtain valuable insights about sedentarism, lifestyle and physical activities. Meant as a quick try-out of our exercises and questions, we noticed the card sort really worked well.
Card Sort
We created a card set with various needs taken from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We applied the Card Sort activity during the interviews which was an excellent tool to help participants perceive things and order them according to inclinations, preferences, values and interests.
User Interview
Hour-long Skype interviews, that form the core of our research. The team did three individual interviews with parents and used an online version of the card sort to warm up and prepare the interviewers for the research questions. During these sessions, they exposed how troublesome it is to combine physical activities into their busy lifestyle and prioritise their children’s demands.
Client Interview
The team had a chance to interview our client and understand his opinion about our target segmentation, the Time Poor Integrators. However, his assumptions were distinct from what we found in our research interview. It was an excellent opportunity to clarify some relevant points about our target audience, about Manchester City Football Group and their needs and desires. Additionally, an exceptional occasion to provide us with powerful insights to develop further solutions.
FitPoints
A platform to incentivise physical activities together with (new) friends and family.
At the core of FitPoints are Challenges. Challenges are actions to be completed by participants and can vary from a simple walk around the block to keeping up a 30-day workout streak.
When you complete or progress on a challenge, you earn points. Points can be redeemed for any of our partners' offers.
This platform aims to support people build routines to sustain healthy lifestyles.
04. Deliver
Insights & Opportunities
Understanding and analysing the three key insights - the need for connection, lack of time and family responsibilities - we recommended and developed a solution: Manchester City Fit Points.
Conclusion
Learnings
Design research can be used to create products, services, and systems that respond to human needs. It is about informing designers, inspiring future scenarios, improving livelihoods and tackling complex problems. The quality of design research depends on multiple factors. Methods and tools are an essential part of it. However, those who share their ideas, opinions, feelings and thoughts are all human beings. We must be honest, respect, honour and value people during our journey through the design research process.
