RUNN
Designed from the ground up, Runn is a fitness app that unites mobiles and smartwatches to transform individual runs into a collective journey, fostering a sense of community among users, connecting, motivating each other, and turning every step into a shared achievement through this innovation.
What I did: Defining the problem, user research, prototyping, usability study, and analyzing data
Duration: October 2022 - December 2022
Problem Space
People often experience heightened effectiveness when running together, tapping into a natural boost in courage, motivation, and commitment that companionship brings. However, many individuals end up running alone due to challenges in finding suitable or flexible companions within their local community. The persistence required in solo exercises places an increased demand for willpower.
Design Challenge
How might we design a solution that seamlessly combines the flexibility of solo exercise with the motivational power derived from shared experiences?
Research
Method
To gain insights into individuals’ objectives for group running, the influencing factors behind these goals, and the preferences and concerns related to running alone versus running with others, we conducted surveys and interviews with individuals who regularly run with a group, run alone, and those who infrequently participate in running activities. Additionally, we conducted two observational sessions during running group events.
Key Insights
Our data analysis, utilizing detailed note encoding and affinity mapping, produced four key insights:
Personas
Defining Success
Motivation
The design should empower users to mutually motivate each other during running, fostering a sense of support, competency, shared goal accomplishment, and alleviating boredom.
Convenience
The design should minimize user effort in finding and registering for running sessions that align with their preferred time, location, and style, ensuring a streamlined and effortless experience.
Companionship
The design should facilitate quick, glanceable interactions, delivering timely and concise communication that fosters connection without distracting users during their runs.
Design
Design Hypothesis
We believe that a virtual shared experience eliminates the constraints of time, location, and pace when seeking running companions. Given the straightforward and low-interaction nature of running, our design aims to deliver a virtual shared experience that seamlessly replicates the simplicity and ease of in-person running.
Key Design Decisions
Initial Explorations - Hardware Choice
We debated between two hardware options: Smartwatch + Smartphone + Earpiece (optional), or Smart Glasses + Smartphone.
After comparing across dimensions such as users' familiarity, comfort, immersive experience, safety, ease of operation while running, and the number of wearable devices, we found that the smartwatch solution excels in users' familiarity, comfort, and safety. The smart glasses offer advantages in immersive companionship and ease of operation, but these benefits are mitigated by the less crucial role of eye contact during running. Exploratory research confirmed that smartwatches can be operated with gestures, overcoming their previous disadvantage. Therefore, we opted for the smartwatch + smartphone + earpiece (optional) solution.
Gesture Control
To address finger occlusion challenges on smartwatches, we introduced gesture controls for functionalities performed across multiple pages. This design choice extends operations from the small smartwatch screen to free space, reducing UI interactions during running. We identified 40 intuitive, recognizable, and ergonomics-friendly gestures, evaluating them through three tests: 1. Guess the function, 2. Memory, and 3. Stress. From these, we selected the top 6 gestures with the highest scores, ensuring effective and user-friendly control for identified functionalities.
Mute/Unmute Voice
Dismiss Notification
Fist Bump
High-Five
Shake Hand
Hand Stack
Adding Onboarding Screens and Surveys
During usability testing on our low-fidelity prototype, participants highlighted confusion and ambiguity in written information and filter items while attempting to find and attend events. In response, we have chosen to implement onboarding screens and surveys to provide users with more comprehensive information about the product, collect essential user details, and understand individual running preferences.
Order of Watch Home Screens
We've decided to rearrange the order of our home screens—specifically, the running list, live track, and personal status pages. Given that the live track and personal status pages provide more detailed or visualized information, we positioned the running list page as the central screen, providing users with a quicker and more intuitive access point to comprehensive runner overviews. This adjustment reduces the need for multiple swipes, streamlining user interaction by enabling a single left or right swipe to access the second crucial information based on individual preferences.
Final Design
Get onboarded to fully enjoy Runn
Onboarding informs users of a brief introduction to what Runn Mobile and Runn Watch do. The survey consists of three questions, asking about running preference, duration, and pace.
Browse and join virtual running events
Based on the answers from the onboarding survey and the data collected from the past events that the user joined, Runn recommends virtual running events. Users can apply filters to find better what they are looking for.
Let’s start the virtual running event
Once the running event begins, users can voice chat with the group. They also have an option to mute their voice. Users can also check the group member’s running pace, distance, and rank live.
Get motivated by other runners or keep your pace
Runn also provides users with another way to check others’ statuses. The live track screen shows only four people closest to the user’s rank. The profiles animate and change in real-time. Users can also check their running status with the given heart rate, distance, average pace, and rolling pace.
Interact with others with gestures
Runn also enables users to make a fist bump or a high-five gesture and send it to the group to celebrate running achievements. The group will get notified and can respond to the sender by making the same gesture.
Send emojis to express how you feel
Apart from interactive gestures, users can also select and send emojis to the group. The emojis will pop up on the home screen so that everyone can see them.
Switch to Solo mode for your focus
Solo mode in Runn helps users focus on themselves while virtually running with others. It won’t show others’ running statuses and all interactions, including voice chat, emojis, and gestures.
See how you and your group did after the event
After the running event ends, the summary of the event can be checked in the Runn Mobile app. Running achievements, group ranking, the number of interactions the group made, and details of personal running status can be found here.
Credits
Julia Choi
Haotian Wu
Tina Tran