Trivia Trails is a mobile application that aims to motivate youth to exercise more by making physical activity fun, social, and competitive. It uses trivia questions, social networking features, and competitions to engage users as they walk. The app tracks users' movement via GPS and users can answer trivia questions along trails to earn points. This gamifies exercise in a way that is tailored for youth by incorporating social elements and competition. Initial testing showed the prototype was easy to use but the visual design could be improved.
Why we choose the targeted user group: The youths in this target group may not have the chance to exercise often. Polytechnics do not have PE lessons for their students. These students may be less willing to take the initiative to exercise on their own. In a survey we conducted with some youths from our target age group, some of them said that they were lazy to exercise on their own yet they like having PE. Hence, with the help of our design idea, we would like to encourage them to do more physical activity.
Side goal: encourage them to do more physical activity Why we choose walking as the physical activity we want: simple, a form of exercise that can be incorporated into our daily lives. Surveyees said they are willing to treat walking as a form of exercise. Why social networking: from research and surveys, we found out that our target group are more likely to exercise when their friends are doing the same thing as them and they have something in common to share about. Motivation from competition between friends. They are also more willing to exercise in the company of friends. Why let them create their own trails: higher engagement of users
Trivia TriviaTrails is based on the idea of making exercise fun through trivia. During their walks, users will receive trivia at pre-set checkpoints. Trivia topics cover a large range of material, from music trivia to language trivia to trivia about local history. Users can customize their experience by selecting the topic areas they’d like to receive on. Competition Many studies show that competition can be used as an effective motivator. To motivate our users, TriviaTrails incorporates friendly competition between users based on rankings in a points system. Users can get points by walking on trails, submitting new trails, and participating in monthly challenges and time-limited competitions. This rewards system gives users extrinsic rewards through prizes for achieving certain amounts of points. Interactivity TriviaTrails allows users to play an active role in shaping their experience with the application. They can create their own trails, customize the trivia they receive, participate in an online community, and use the application for social networking. Social Networking TriviaTrails has an online community where users can upload their own trails, rate and review other users’ trails, and compare their points ranking against other users. The application also enables users to set up group events for walking on trails, making the exercising more fun by getting friends involved.
Tailored for our target audience Our target audiences will be youths aged 17-18. Youths from this age group, will most likely be at a new stage of their life, be it a Junior College, Polytechnic and etc. This application can help youths to find likeminded individuals in a new environment. We have designed our application in a way that it looks just like any social application. By emphasizing on the social aspects, it will improve our target audience’s receptiveness to our application. Theory of planned behavior suggests that if the individual has positive beliefs about behavior, control, and normative beliefs, then the intention to do the behavior should be higher. As for the current walking applications available in the market, most emphasizes on mere statistics. Information such as the distance ran, the number of calories burnt and dietary advices will bore them, especially since we are targeting the more inactive group. By adding the social aspects into the walking trail application, youths can organize walking trips and invite their friends to the trail. This facilitate youths to walk as a group--an attempt to change the youth’s exercising habits through persuasion and social influence. The current walking applications usually involve individual effort. That require users to be discipline and motivate in their walking regime. Applications such as chick cliques do promote walking as a group activity, but as the groups are often small, such applications will not be able to leverage the full potential of persuasive technology. To cater to different personalities, our application allows customization, whereby youths can indicate their preferences and our application will provide trivia that is in line with their interest. Youths can also design routes using simple tools with flexible start and end point. WalkJogRun allows users to mark and share their routes and hence the application will be able to advise the user on the possible routes to embark. Although there are initiatives for the group activities, such activities will not attract our target groups as it caters to those who enjoy running, walking or jogging.