Kegel’s Exercise app
Gives women wings to enjoy her life and helps her solve the problem of weak bladder.
About the project
Kegel’s exercise app - Kegel’s community offers guidance about Kegel’s exercises to a community of women who have a weak bladder and want to strengthen their bladder and motivate each other. Kegel exercises are performed by a woman to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles, involving repetitions of both sustained and rapid voluntary contractions of the muscles, and are used primarily to treat urinary incontinence.
The problem
Because of an active lifestyle, people don’t get time to go to the gym or any other yoga classes.
Older adults have time for exercise but forget to do exercises, and most don’t even know how to do those exercises.
Most people get the problem of urinary incontinence but are unaware of the exercises, and their situation worsens.
Even though people are aware of the exercises out of laziness and because of other workloads, they keep postponing them.
The solution
Conclusion
Build an app that includes exercises and food information, which will help strengthen the pelvic floor muscles.
The app will track the progress, like how much the user exercises in a week and what the user should eat to keep his pelvic floor muscle healthy.
It will have a reminder or alarm feature to remind the user about the exercises, so that older adults can remember and do exercises.
The app will have videos about how to do the exercises, so people from rural areas also will be able to understand how to perform the exercises.
The app will have social groups also where people will share their stories or workout plans, and they can motivate each other.
My app is ready with the basic but important features. I am sure it will be beneficial to women who have urinary incontinence problems but are shy or hesitant to talk.
Now, with the feature of the social group, they can share their problems and motivate each other; that's why I named my app KEGEL COMMUNITY.
The project is at the beginning level. So, I am done with the first revision/iteration. I will be testing these newly added features with the users. I will note down their feedback.
Then according to their feedback, I will iterate it again.
I will add more elements like Food info related to the urinary incontinence problem and other health information related to this problem.
Thinking of adding Doctor’s info also, where users can find and contact the Doctor specializing in this Urinary health problem.
The details
Kegel's community app is a kegel exercise app mostly to strengthen the weak bladder and to make women free from urinary incontinence problems.
Inspired by the products that invite user-generated content, the goal is to offer a useful, delightful tool for all to use, from contributor to recipient, connecting communities by the powerful act of sharing what they have and what they know.
Project : Kegel’s exercise app
Duration : 6 weeks
Role: UX/UI, Research, Testing
Empathize
Research
Approaching the project, I had my assumptions, but needed to gather real data from comparable & adjacent products and from the actual people who have weak bladder. As well, specifically understanding the world of user generated content was necessary to set the app for success in how users could trust the information provided.
See how it’s been done
Research on comparable kegel exercise tools that fall within the user generated content and/or free resource offerings was conducted to better understand the tools currently available.
It starts with a plan
Location: Virtual
Method: 1:1 Interviews
Participants: 30-50 yrs
People who have a weak bladder.
Older women.
Objectives: How do people manage this urinary incontinence problem?
What is frustrating about it, and how are they caring for it?
Takeaways:
App should be available for ios, android and web users.
Reminder option should be in the high priority.
Community option should be added, so that women can share their pain, ask questions and get help related to weak bladder problem from the women community.
Hearing from users
Goals
Need reminder to do exercise.
Wants
Improve urinary incontinece problem.
Painpoints
Forgets to do exercise.
Laziness.
Motivation
Sharing the problem with the friends.
Takeaways:
Because of the urinary incontinence problem, women can not enjoy life freely.
Women are okay to share or talk about this problem with other women. (That means they are okay with having social groups of friends who are in the same situation where they can discuss/motivate each other).
Doctors may have told the users how to do kegel exercises, but some have forgotten about it, and some don’t get time for it. We need to make the app easy to use so that even older women can use it.
Make app ads free so users can perform exercises without many distractions.
Add a reminder feature so that users won’t forget to exercise.We need to put exercise videos so that older women or other women who don’t know about it can learn from the videos.
Data personified
The culmination of the research & behavioral synthesis of a community resource contributor resulted in the creation of a persona, Katie Walker.
Takeaways:
I created the persona Katie Walker, a mother of two kids, because most women get urinary incontinence problems mainly after delivery.
She is an independent woman representing today’s women, who work, earn money, and take care of kids, so she is swamped and doesn’t get time for herself, and neglects her health.
Because of not prioritizing herself, which is the problem of most women, she forgets to exercise and needs motivation for that.
Defining the project
To understand the actual problem to solve for, a series of design exercises were completed to get clear on the overall project goals and get specific with the persona's experiences with common contributor tasks.
HMVs and POVs
The problem to solve
This problem statement brainstorming exercise helped to generate solution possibilities based on specific experiences the user would encounter, naming the gap between her expectation & actual experience.
Offering context for scenarios Katie experiences as a contributor (drawn directly from the interviews) explicitly made a connection between solutions and the reasons behind them. This also became the starting point for features to include, as well as features to pin for future updates to the initial launch.
Information Architecture to wireframes
The next step was to study the existing structure of the app itself and build upon the established framework to fold in new feature: hierarchically, functionally.
Let it flow
To stay within my time constraints, I decided to design the three tasks that comprised the main value proposition of the project brief:
Performing an exercise
Adding a reminder
Sharing the completed task with the community
By encouraging the user to reset goals for themselves each week, the user could complete cyclical “journeys” to maintain their progress and promote long-term use of the app.
Wireframes
Wireframes screens were created to work with how different elements would be arranged and fit onto the compact size of a mobile screen. Colors shown are placeholders & for clarity (e.g., icon color code), the purpose was to convey how the meaning of the various icons and primary buttons would test with users and not necessarily represent final colors.
Wireframes of three user flows for usability testing were created to understand how users will respond to the ways information is revealed in a newly designed Kegel’s exercise tool.
Designed Kegel's exercise page, Add a reminder page and Social group page
Add reminder page - User will be able to add the reminder for the exerciese.
Exercise page - User will be able to perform the exercises according to days.
Community page -It is a social media group where user will be able to share the task completed by them and ask querries and motivate each other.
Takeaways :
Users were able to understand the icons and functionality of the Kegel's exercise app properly.
They liked the idea of having a social group in the fitness app where they could share and motivate each other.
Users found the reminder feature useful.
The progress bar given on the exercise page helped the user to understand the amount of task that needs to be done to complete the particular level.
UI kit
Takeaways:
While I was conducting user research, I also started working on the visual design of the app.
Color Palette: I looked up colors that are commonly associated with feminism. I thought having a variety of colors would also be more engaging so I made sure to include a few accents that I could use.
Logo: I choose logo in a round shape to show the united community.
Group of people in the circle as if all the women are holding hands, motivating each other, and celebrating together in a round circle. This represents community and cooperation.
Typography: I also choose sans-serif, rounded fonts for a friendly feeling.
Brand Attributes: Trustworthy, Relaxing, Engaging, Reflective, Informative.
High fidelity screens Gif
High fidelity screens were designed using UI KIT.
Adjacent is the short glimpse of Kegal exercise sign in page and community page, where all the women can share their goals and problem and give suggestions if needed.
Usability testing
Two sets of usability tests were conducted: wireframes screens and then high-fidelty screens (inclusive of feedback received). For a highly-detailed Kegel’s exercise app, it was important to get feedback early on basic app functionality, and being mindful of resources needed for comprehensive revisions at high-fidelity.
Usability testing and prototype
The screens were prototyped and tested in a moderated setting to collect a direct and nuanced understanding of icons and Kegel’s exercise function, along with common tasks that a contributor would complete. The ability to ask follow-up question in real time offered valuable feedback and suggestions based on immediate reactions rather than measured responses (as in an unmoderated test, that can muddy the line between genuine user experience and the urge to do well on the "test".)
Shown here is a flow for sinning in for an app, performing the task, adding the reminder and sharing with others.
Takeaways :
Users were able to perform the task properly.
Users were happy to share their completed task with the other friends.
There was no frustration of forgetting about the exercise, because of reminder feature.
Progress bar at the bottom of the actual exercise/activity page helped them to understand how much exercise is remaining and confirmation page assured them that they have completed the task.
Painpoints:
Some of the users were not aware of how to exercise, so they asked for a video tutorial.
Some of the users were looking for actual social media feel, so they said it would be nice to have a chat feature where people who are online can give immediate replies to the query asked.
Iterating for ease
This first round of revisions focused on the high priority changes needed in the Kegel’s exercise app.
Introduced video tutorial feature under “info icon”. Now the new user can watch tutorial videos of kegle’s exercise.
Changed the Tense and Relax circle color, so that user won’t get confuse with actionable color.
Introduced “chat icon” for instant messages/chatting.
It will save time by getting immediate help.
Takeaways:
Users will be able to watch the video tutorial under the “info icon.” It was a much-needed iteration.
First, I was thinking of putting a “video icon,” but then I thought of creating an “info icon” so that I, as a designer, can add other elements too under the “info icon.”
Having “an instant chat feature” was also on high priority because women do like to chat, and if we provide a social group, they can share or talk about the routine or ask questions and get the answers to queries instantly.
Takeaways:
I could empathize with the problem and tried to solve the problem.
My app is ready with the basic but important features. I am sure it will be beneficial to women who have urinary incontinence problems but are shy or hesitant to talk.
Don’t be afraid to mix methodologies to gather the best result.
Iconography should be powerful, when the data is dense and where screen space is scare.
Beyond aesthetics, color can communicate so much, so need to choose color carefully.