Interaction Design » Carousel iPhone Weight Watchers app

Project Specifications

We propose an iPhone application called Carousel for the Weight Watchers program. The proposed application motivates new/existing Weight Watchers members through a fun, interactive, and supportive virtual community. The layout of the design is two-fold.

1. Carousel, a visual representation of the group members
2. Updates section, a way for everyone to keep in contact

The default opening screen of the updates section is the Group View. This group view works in a similar way to the Twitter home page. The features of this view include…

• Ambient awareness to what everyone is doing in the virtual group… from how they feel to how much they ate to how much exercised that day
• Assigned to a group depending on your default location, set up through GPS
• Other group members do not know where you live, only that you are within a certain distance radius

Our application addresses this long-term need of continuing with the Weight Watchers program even after reaching the goal. Through the group interaction, the participants feel good by encouraging others and receiving encouragement in return.

This group encouragement strengthens the individual's investment in the group, and helps promote "stickiness," both with Weight Watchers and the Carousel app on the iPhone.

Prototype Specifications

Materials: poster board and paper.

We drew a large-scale iPhone in the center of the poster board, and cut out the center the iPhone so we could change screens. We cut a long length of the poster board and drew icons on it so that we could "scroll" through the virtual group members. Two pieces of paper were folded as an accordion to mimic the way the iPhone reveals additional options after selecting a menu item.

Research

Our team did primary and secondary research to understand the user and develop our problem space. Our research included:

• Attending a local Weight Watchers meeting
• surfing the online Weight Watchers community forums and blog posts
• concentrated research based on our target demographic, the Generation X career woman (largest Weight Watchers demographic)

The Generation X career woman is determined to be a good employee, mother, wife, daughter, best friend, etc. With so many responsibilities, she has trouble making time for herself, or even justifying the need to make time for herself. As such, we wanted to create an application that provides community support that is innate to the WW group meeting. At the same time, we didn't want the application to take time away from the other responsibilities in these women's lives.

References:

• NAS Recruitment Communications. "Getting to Know Generation X." (2006). Accessed October 9, 2008.
• Peterson, Karen S. "Gen X Moms Have it Their Way." USA Today (2003). Accessed October 7, 2008.
• Weight Watchers International, Inc. (2008). Accessed October 10, 2008.

Design Presentation

Download a copy of this presentation, which includes our design rationale in the slide notes.
(11MB zipped folder)

Team ( November 2008 )

Binaebi Akah, Robert Kariuki, Heiko Maiwand

Responsibilities

Secondary research, affinity diagramming, photo documentation, concept generation, sketching, paper prototype, usability testing