Problem Domain
When coming together to decide what topics of interest we would be interested in tackling, our group quickly came to the conclusion that personal health and wellbeing was an area we wanted to focus on. After finding significant amounts of research showing the correlation between going outside and mental wellbeing, we decided to focus on finding ways to get users to go outside more frequently. This would allow us to have a positive impact on our users lives and help them build meaningful habits and a better relationship with the outdoors.
Baseline Study
For our baseline study, we recruited 4 participants. Our target audience is adults with busy schedules who would like to spend more time outside. With college being a busy period during which we spend many hours indoors, we recruited college students to participate in this study. When screening participants, we made sure to only recruit participants who do not already spend time outside each day. Our goal is to get people outside more, and so those who go outside each day would have little to gain from an intervention. We also screened participants to ensure they want to ideally go outside at least a few days per week. Any less would mean we would not get enough information from them in a 5 day study. Lastly, we screened participants to ensure they enjoy time outside. Those who do not have less incentive to go outside, and so they are not our target audience.
We made an effort to recruit students from a wide age range and with different types of schedules. Our participants’ age range is 19-29. Some participants have jobs in addition to schoolwork, and others do not.
With this baseline study, we hoped to extract the following information: the gap between how often people would like to go outside and how often they actually do, how they spend their time outside, emotional changes from going outside, and which factors contribute to or impede going outside . We also hoped to gain insight as to how motivation to go outside affects total time spent outside.
For this study, we asked participants to log each time they went outside over the span of 5 days. We asked them to record the start and end times of each excursion, a description of what they did, and their emotions before and after going outside. At the end of each day, we sent participants a brief survey in which we asked about their level of motivation to go outside and any factors that prevented them from or encouraged them to go outside.
After completing our baseline study, we synthesized our data into the following affinity and frequency maps. To read a more detailed description of these maps, please visit the section titled “Affinity Map and Frequency Map” in this blog post.
Baseline Study Affinity Map
Baseline Study Frequency Map
When synthesizing data from our baseline study, we found there were three factors that most strongly influenced our participants and how frequently they went outside: Time, Weather, and Social factors. Using these factors, we developed the following mind map. For more details, see the section titled “Models – Mind Map” in this blog post.
Baseline Study Model: Mind Map
Comparative Research/Analysis
To encourage users to go outside, we analyzed a few existing solutions that target this behavior. Below are the eight representative apps we looked at that solve for increasing outdoor activity.
From mapping these solutions on a comparative matrix, we found an open market in the general audience, informative space, in which we hope to distinguish our product from others by reaching more people and designing around user’s existing routines to minimize activation energy. For a more detailed description of our comparative research and analysis, please refer to this blog post.
Literature Review
In our previous blog post, we listed the above 8 pieces of literature that have aided our study design, and summarized the key findings from each of them. All of these studies show supportive evidence that going outside is good for mental health, and the overall health status as well. Therefore, we decided to work on an intervention study to improve participants’ time spent on the outdoor activity. A majority of these studies focus on college students and that motivated our intervention research to target college students as a first pass.
One research paper highlights the importance of urban green spaces and opportunities for outdoor recreation to foster students’ wellbeing in their everyday lives. That motivates our design to encourage participants to link their daily life with more green spaces or plants. Therefore, in our intervention studies, we created the daily challenge part, asking the participants to take pictures of trees, flowers and animals outside. In our prompt messages, we remind our participants about the nice weather outside, and encourage them to go out.
Personas and Journey Maps
Our group is focusing on increasing recreational time spent outdoors. We were able to synthesize information from our 5-day baseline study to develop an intervention study. We selected two representative participants and summarized their Personas and Journey Maps in this blog post. For a detailed description of our Personas and Journey Maps, see the sections titled “Provision Personas + Journey Maps” and “Journey Maps” in the link above.
Below are our personas and journey maps:
Persona 1: Full-Time Student with a Full-Time Job
Persona 2: Gregarious Greg
Intervention/Product Ideation
After developing our personas, corresponding journey maps, and comparative analysis, we used a few key insights to develop the following (initial) three ideas for an intervention. These key insights were the following:
- People like using the time they spend outdoors as a time to be social.
- Bad weather, as defined by the person, is a common reason to not go outside.
- In the case of Pokémon GO, gamification can be very effective for getting people outdoors, especially when it involves exploring to find new items.
The first three ideas that we developed to address these key insights were:
- Good Weather Alert
- Group Walk Organizer
- Scavenger Hunt
For a more detailed description of how we developed these ideas as well as their pros and cons, please visit the section titled “Intervention/Product Ideation” in this blog post.
We also came up with other ideas based on findings from our baseline studies, literature review, and comparative analysis. We plotted all our ideas onto the following brainstorm axis. One axis represents the amount of effort required by the user, and the other axis represents the amount of time users would spend outside.
After discussing the above three ideas and placing them on the brainstorm axis, we decided to combine them into one app. We did this because we wanted our intervention idea to include all three key insights.
We liked the idea of gamifying going outside through a scavenger hunt, but we agreed that scavenger hunts require a large amount of effort from the user and can cause users to lose interest. And so, we shifted towards daily challenges. These challenges would give users a task to complete each day, and these tasks must be completed outside. Instead of rewarding users with a found item, users would feel intrinsically rewarded by having completed a challenge.
With an intrinsic reward established, we wanted to remind users of their achievements– through photos! Users will take photos of their completed challenges, and we will send them weekly recaps in the form of a photo collage. We came to this idea after considering apps like Spotify. At the end of each year, Spotify gives users a yearly recap of their most listened-to songs, known as Spotify Wrapped. We have noticed that users enjoy sharing these recaps on platforms like Instagram. While Spotify is not an inherently social app, the yearly recap has become a yearly social tradition on social media. Friends can share their favorite songs / artists and compare their music interests. Some users have even stated that they use Spotify instead of Apple Music so that they can receive this yearly recap. Considering the success of Spotify Wrapped, we decided to include a recap of our own. Our intervention study is only 5 days long, so we chose a weekly recap instead. Including this recap will allow for the social component that some users like Gregarious Greg want from outdoor experiences.
We also wanted to address the bad weather issue. However, since we identified potential long periods of bad weather as a con for this idea, we decided to expand on this feature. In addition to good weather alerts, users will also be notified when it is sunset. Some participants in our baseline study expressed that sunset is their favorite time of day, so sunsets seemed like a good choice for an extra alert to offset long periods of bad weather.
Intervention Study
For our intervention study, we did a wizard of oz style interaction by messaging the participants every morning and once during the day/evening with a prompt to go outside. The morning prompt provided a photo based challenge for the participant to complete at some point during their day, with some examples including taking a picture of a bird, tree, or favorite building. The afternoon/evening prompt was a weather or event based message, telling participants to go view the sunset or that it is sunny outside and they should go outside for a few minutes. For a more detailed description of the intervention study, please read the section titled “Intervention Study” in this blog post.
We had a mix of participants, 4 who participated in our baseline study and one who was new for the intervention study. The previous participants were invited back due to their enthusiastic completion of the baseline study, and the new participant was chosen primarily to diversify our roster after passing the screening from our baseline study. Throughout the course of the intervention study we came to a few significant conclusions that we plan to utilize in our product development. We found that the smaller nudges were very effective in getting people to go outside more, even if just for a few minutes, and many participants noted that they enjoyed the reminders when they were related to weather and events like the sunset. Even when our participants were bogged down with work and other priorities they took the time when prompted to go outside. They also generally enjoyed the reward at the end of the week with the collage, with some even saying they wished they had done more during the study. Overall these insights will allow us to create a product that can effectively prompt users to go outside more frequently, bettering their health and wellbeing overall.
Below is an example of a weekly recap sent out to a participant. Consent was received from the participant to share this.
Storyboard
For a more detailed description of our storyboard, please refer to the section titled “Storyboard” in this blog post.
Current Direction We Are Moving In
We currently plan to have a mobile application that is very similar to our intervention study. The app would remind users at a customizable rate to go outside at specific times during the day, and would provide users photo based challenges to create a fun collage every week to recap the times they were outdoors. There are currently no plans to have a social aspect to the app, however we are currently exploring ways to make the collages and challenge completions sharable off the app.
Overall, our participants expressed that while some challenges were more difficult to complete than others, they found the challenges to be rewarding and effective in getting them outside more. For this reason, we plan to keep daily challenges as a feature of our app and as the primary nudge to get users outside.
All of our participants expressed that they found the midday reminder prompts to be helpful and effective. Some said that they would have forgotten to complete the challenges without the midday reminder. However, some participants said that they felt pressured to complete challenges when they received texts. For these reasons, we plan to continue with reminder prompts in our mobile application while also remaining mindful of our wording to prevent users from feeling pressured.
Our participants also shared that they enjoyed the sunset and good weather prompts. Two participants said that they especially appreciated being alerted when it was sunset, and both went outside as a result. For this reason, we plan to keep sunset / good weather reminders as a feature of our app.
Most of our participants highly enjoyed the weekly recap they received and described it as a motivating factor to continue going outside. Some said that they felt a sense of accomplishment looking back on their time spent outside throughout the week. For this reason, we plan to move forward with the weekly recaps in our mobile app.
The decisions we have made here followed synthesis of our intervention study and post-study interviews into the following affinity map:
Intervention Study Affinity Map
