User Attention Prototype

Introduction

During our initial interviews, we found many participants would skip doing daily physical therapy because it was monotonous. How can we ensure that people complete these exercises daily so that they have the best chance at recovery? We used popular game, Subway Surfers, to see how individuals react to visual stimulation while working out. Will this decrease their sense of monotony?

Methods

We prepared 2 prototypes:

1. The first was a leg lift exercise and a timer by itself with no additional media.
2. The second is this same left lift exercise but with the additional, subway surfers media included.We had participants try both prototypes in a random order and recorded how much time before they stopped doing the exercise.

Findings

While participants had similar times with an without media, all participants noted that exercising with media was much less painful than without. Participants also noted that time felt like it moved faster while the media was available to them.

Does more media mean that participants can work out for even longer?

How much media is too much media? After testing this initial prototyping, we tried allowing participants to watch subway surfers footage and listen to a story. These stories were from sites like Reddit and were typically about relationships. We found that once again, the time of workouts between the differing amounts of media were similar. However, participants noted that the story audio was overwhelming. We also noted that participants were missing cues to change position during exercise.

Key Learnings

After conducting our prototype, we were able to draw some key learnings.

1. Firstly, we found that incorporating media can be an effective way to make exercising less monotonous, which can help people to stay motivated and continue their workouts
2. However, we also discovered that it's important to balance the use of media during exercise, as too much can be distracting and cause people to miss changes in their workout routine
3. Additionally, we learned that people want to have the ability to choose their own media for their workouts. Overall, these insights have provided us with valuable information as we continue to work on developing our service.

We plan to keep refining the design of bodyless self-correct UI system and conduct more user tests.

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