Wearables Research
& Project Fonda
Role: Researcher, Author, Design Strategist
When Uncorked Studios was approached to develop a health and wellness concept product, I began by leading a month-long research project to better understand the existing landscape and where opportunities for improvement might lie. To help manage both time and budgets, I asked for volunteers from within the studio, and was pleasantly surprised over half of the team agreed to join.
Over the course of four weeks, I developed a series of activities and challenges designed to explore how ideas such as competitive-versus-cooperative, data-as-narrative, and device design all played a part in the success or failure of each of the products tested.
Although this research was done at the end of 2014, many of the findings remain as relevant today as they were then.
The final report, Tracking Progress and the companion essay The Meaning of Measurement, are available here.
Project Fonda
Project Fonda, the catalyst for the wearables research project, took the finding of that research and applied them to a health and wellness system centered around an advanced, web-enabled cable box, and targeting groups such as families and coworkers.
TV Concept Development
The central strategy of this concept focused on a key insight from our research which indicated that working as team lead to increased participation, and better results for all members of that team. With that in mind, the Fonda concept looked at health and wellness tracking as a group endeavor — specifically families — and the social hub of many American families is the TV. While a companion mobile app helped team members to focus on physical health and activity, we leveraged the connected nature of the cable box to help enable more communal activities that focused on mental heath and stress reduction. Recommending movies for a family movie night, finding and surfacing meal recipes to and encouraging families to cook and eat together, and leveraging an on-screen notification system to help keep each team member aware of each others achievements, all provide a focus on social health that's every bit as important as physical.
Mobile concept
While the TV/Cable box combination focused on the overall team health, the mobile component allowed each member of that team to set their own personal goals, and track their progress towards those goals.
Mobile Food Tracking Concept development
A major part of this concept looked at how meal tracking is handled. Rather than focus on precise measurements of qualities — common in most food tracking software — the Fonda concept approached meal tracking in a higher-level, trend-based focused on ease of use and seeking to create consistent use patterns — something our data showed was far more important than recording precise meal data. Different concepts examined ideas as varied as color processing of photos, portion approximation, and simply encouraging the addition of healthy foods rather than restricting specific "problem" foods. Each of these was based by emerging health science and each proved easier for participants to follow over time.