Once their goals are established, they are directed to the UP happy home page. This home page is personalized and will say, for instance, “Hey Sam, how are you feeling today?”. From this home page, the user can then view the main menu, which allows users to keep track of their happiness, movement, sleep, and eating–similar to the current Jawbone UP interface. Unlike the original UP interface, however, we have also included an option titled “U jam with Songza”. This is the heart of our behaviour change. We believe that music is a powerful force to get people excited and amped up to do exercise and lead a healthy lifestyle. Especially with Songza, which is a free-music service that allows users to listen to music that matches their mood.

For this challenge, we found that the rhetoric of fitness trackers and quantified-self products all sounds roughly the same. The quantified self market pushes their users into becoming fitness “freaks” who follow a strict, calculated regiment that guides their daily lives from their sleeping, eating, and exercising habits. While there is certainly a market that is receptive to this intense, disciplined rhetoric, we found that it also alienates a large contingent of its potential market that wants to be fit. Our project therefore seeks to transform this rhetoric, as well as our user’s interaction with these products, in a way that expands the potential market for fitness trackers and quantified self products and changes user behaviour. From the onset of this challenge, our goal was jokingly “to get our mothers to use this product,” because we both agreed that our mothers were a demographic who would be most resistant to this quantified self rhetoric. In addition to this goal of getting our mothers to use this product, we wanted to adopt a vision similar to that propounded by FastCo Design: “Technology becomes obsolete at such a rapid pace that we are unable to develop the emotional attachments to these objects formed with the other items we wear, such as jewelry. Wearables do not pull at our heartstrings, and so their value must lie in their long-term function. Convincing consumers to wear a product that lacks an emotional connection, and tells them something they already know (or can easily guess), requires a nuanced strategy: incentivize the regular usage of the device.. through personal engagement that prioritizes our well being rather than our statistics.” Our user journey therefore adopts this approach of creating an emotional connection between our products and the users. We believe that personalisation and customisation is key to meet the needs of each individual user. As you will see below in our description of the user journey, each leg of the journey is designed with the user’s needs and desires in mind.

To preface the description of our user journey, rather than using FitBit for this challenge we chose to work with Jawbone’s UP. Jawbone UP is similar to FitBit in the sense that it is also a fitness tracker that measures one’s sleeping, eating, and exercising habits. In contrast to FitBit, however, we found that the Jawbone brand promotes a philosophy that is less entered on discipline than that of FitBit and more on living better. None of the Jawbone UP products have a screen, so you actually cannot check regularly your step count. All of you data becomes available to users through its mobile application. Furthermore, the Jawbone brand is very design-centered, given that its products and aesthetic were created by Yves Behr, a renowned Swiss designer.

User-Journey: We sought to change the behavior of those who fear quantified self and fitness tracking. We recognise that such a disciplined lifestyle is not meant for everyone, including ourselves, and so we wanted to design a product that motivated wellbeing and regulated fitness, without alienating our target demographic who typically fears such routines. In order to achieve this, we sought to reproduce the original Jawbone UP mobile application and create a nuanced version that appealed to the needs of this demographic. Our version is called UP happy, which is meant to reflect our interest in changing our user’s emotions towards fitness tracking. It is inspired by the Special K ad’s where women would get on a scale and rather than the scale reflecting their weight, it reflected positive and encouraging words, such as “joy.” This is the type of encouragement and interaction we believed would cause the behaviour change among our users and enable users to cultivate a long-standing relationship with their fitness trackers.

Upon tapping our version of the UP mobile application, you are immediately greeted by the UP happy homepage that is headlined by a statement that says “Welcome to UP happy. Your wellbeing is our jam”.

The next leg of the user journey prompts the user to describe how they are feeling about exercise, with a cute smiley face that is placed over a playful pink background. By sliding up or down over the smiley, the smiley changes his face and posture to reflect either happiness (if he slides up) or sadness (if he slides down). This is a sharp contrast to the traditional Jawbone journey that prompts the user to instantly create their profile, which asks them for their height, weight, gender, and birthday.

Followed by this, the UP happy user is then asked to create a profile. However, this time the user is not asked to reveal their weight, height, or age. Instead, they are only simply asked for their name and email— as we believe that it is too soon in the relationship between UP happy and the UP happy user, for that UP happy user to reveal such personal data. If the UP happy user would like to add their weight, height, and age, they are welcome to do so by clicking on the UP happy side bar where they can input that information

After this step, we have the UP happy user establish their goals of the relationship. These goals are not just weight or exercise-related, but instead related to emotions. For instance, they are asked to talk about their happiness goals.

Down the line, we hope that the UP happy application can continue to innovatively seek to engage the user to foster this long-time relationship. One of the ideas is to have the bracelet itself be able to play the Songza music that the user can control from the mobile application. Given that Jawbone designs speakers, we think that this is a realistic long-term goal. Another idea would be to create a virtual reality game that would sync the user’s workout to this game that takes place in real-time.

We will further use music as a tool to amusingly regulate our user’s usage of the application. When the user stops using the product regularly, music will be played from the application such as “Baby Come Back” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn-enjcgV1o) to remind the user to use the product. Similarly, if the user has not exercised in a while, perhaps a song, such as “Physical” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA). The music will change regularly and will also not be playe
d every week to make sure that the user is never annoyed by its product. However, we believe that this is an important component to make sure that a behaviour is habitualized by the user. If the user is on vacation and would not like to get these settings, there is a vacations mode that will be sure to not bother the user.

After a long time of interacting, the UP happy application will seek to maintain a relationship with its user through personalized communication that is interactive. To do this, it will recognize milestones, such as “Congrats Sam! You are awesome. Today is our 1 year anniversary, great job!”