Overview
This UX design project explored how to improve workout consistency among college students, who often drop off after initial engagement due to low motivation and a lack of social accountability. While many students intend to stay active, they struggle to follow through without structured support or peer reinforcement.
PeerPace is a social fitness application designed to address this gap by making fitness more collaborative and socially engaging at the university level. The platform allows students to track and share workouts, discover routes and campus “hidden gems,” and participate in group challenges. By emphasizing social accountability through features like small groups, leaderboards, and shared activity, PeerPace aims to turn fitness from an individual task into a consistent, community-driven behavior.
Role
Team
Timeline
Aug 2021 - Dec 2021
Methods
Personas,
User Interviews,
Storyboarding,
Journey Maps
Tools
Context
Many college students fall short of recommended exercise levels, increasing their risk of long-term physical and mental health issues. Activity levels tend to decline starting in adolescence and continue dropping into adulthood, leading to more sedentary behavior over time.
While students often intend to stay active, that intent rarely translates into action. A key gap is the lack of social planning—without coordination or accountability with peers, workouts are easily deprioritized and consistency breaks down.
The Problem
College students struggle to maintain consistent workout routines as academic demands and social priorities take precedence. While many have the intention to stay active, workouts are often deprioritized in favor of coursework or time with friends. Without built-in accountability or social coordination, this leads to inconsistent habits and eventual drop-off.
User Research
Our team conducted competitive analysis and user interviews to understand our targeted users' needs and pain points. We then funneled these insights into affinity maps, stakeholder maps, and personas to create a strong foundation for ideation.
From our research, we derived a few key findings about our targeted user group's attitude and behavior.
Brainstorming
With our user research acting as a strong foundation, our team felt free to brainstorm and ideate possible solutions.
We later narrowed down our ideas based on our user interviews and group discussion, settling on an app that encouraged fitness through your social connections with leaderboards and scheduled workouts with friends.
Sketching Our Users
With a better idea of what PeerPace might look like, our team began sketching out the structure and possible features of the app that might appeal to our personas—Marissa and Charles.
From there, we began storyboarding and imagining scenarios or situations where our personas might use the app's possible features in their lives.
Wireframing
Now with pieces of our solution, we just needed to bring it all together. First, we considered user flow. How will the user enter and navigate our app? What pathways will they take to complete their desired tasks?
With pathways established, now it was time to build the overall structure—or at least a rough idea of it.
The low-fidelity prototype screens for the user task of adding a checkpoint or pitstop.
After our team created our low-fidelity prototype, we wanted outside perspective on our structure before we committed—not too dissimilar from the way home inspectors check the bones of a house before you buy it.
UFT analysis for the low-fidelity checkpoints' user flow and features.
Style Guide
After iterating in response to the feedback we received from our UFT analysis, we began crafting a mini style guide to ensure that our app's looked consistent across all screens.
The Solution
Let's get granular—or in this case, pixel-ar—and discuss the design decisions our team made, culminating in our final prototype.
The Home page acts as a social feed for users, encouraging connection and accountability through social connections.
ACCOUNTABILITY REMINDERS
Users receive reminders of their scheduled workout sessions with their peers directly in their feed, helping them stay consistent and follow through with their workouts
SHARE YOUR PROGRESS
Users can share their achievements, streaks, leaderboard position, session workouts, favorite routes, and pitstops.
FIND YOUR PROGRAM PEERS
Under their name, users can add a subheading with their university program which helps cultivate community.
Tracking features allow for progress visibility which helps encourage users to exercise.
RECORD YOUR WORKOUT SESSIONS
By logging consistently, users add more information to their fitness journey, rounding out their progress visibility.
SHARE YOUR FAVORITE ROUTES
Promote routes around campus with Peers to create and share something new.
PIN YOUR HIDDEN GEM PITSTOPS
Promote hidden gems around campus with Peers to discover things never seen before.
Community features link users with their broader university community.
JOIN GROUPS AND WORK OUT TOGETHER
Users can join groups with Peers or community members to stay accountable, share progress, and participate in workouts together—whether in person or virtually.
DISCOVER PEERS, EVENTS, AND GROUPS
Users can find new people, events, and groups of peers to work out with, connecting them with their community.
COMPLETE CHALLENGES TO EARN POINTS FOR LEADERBOARD
Complete workout sessions and challenges to increase rank and position on various group leaderboards.
Learnings
Get comfortable with adapting. Design decisions can evolve as new insights and user feedback emerge. Don't get married to a vision and be against change. The design process requires frequent, constant iterations.
Don't skimp on the process before designing. By elaborating on your understanding, defining, and ideating, you can cut down on the amount of time needed to design your final prototype, Give yourself a roadmap to get to the destination faster.
Vet your ideas before you commit. While design often requires adaptation and frequent iterations, designers can reduce unnecessary revisions by first ensuring their concepts are usable and well thought out. Consider both usability and aesthetics early in the process, before moving into high-fidelity prototyping.