A first of its kind, we worked closely with Nature Play WA to imagine and bring to life a new mobile app to encourage young girls to get active.
- UX Research
- Digital Strategy
- UI & UX Design
- iOS and Android App
Encouraging activity and healthy lifestyles
Research shows that at around age 11 girls experience a dramatic drop off in their physical activity levels and in Australia, 90% of 11–17-year-old girls don’t get enough physical activity for good health.
With an objective of encouraging tween and teenage girls to swap catch-ups on the couch with activities in their local area, we worked closely with the Nature Play team to understand and strategise the potential for technology to help bridge the gap and facilitate a positive approach to an active lifestyle. Given the target audience and their regular usage of mobile technology, we recommended the development of a mobile app for iOS and Android that would delight, engage and empower the girls without needing to change their behaviour.
Collaborative Design
To ensure the app was in the best position for success, we conducted several workshops with groups of girls who would be the target audience of the app. These sessions allowed the girls to test out various prototypes, suggest features and functionality for the app, and assist in the design process. The outcome and interface of the app are, almost entirely, a reflection of the process we went through with these students and is a great example of co-design with the target audience.
“We had a somewhat unusual brief in that we wanted our Talk N Walk app to be co-designed with the target audience – 11-14-year-old-girls. For tween and teen girls to have input, through a series of UX design and prototyping workshops - at every step of the way. We decided to engage Humaan as our app developers because we got a sense that our project excited them and that they would be a true collaborator. We were not disappointed. Thank you!”
Kellie Hill, Projects Executive (Nature Play WA)
Driving engagement through personalisation
Working with the students it became very clear that a core feature that would help drive engagement and stickiness was personalisation. They didn’t want a vanilla app that felt corporate or purely functional, they wanted to be able to express themselves as much as find use in the utility. For students that play video games or use social media, they understood how this would influence their continued use of the product.
Gamification
While the objectives of the app had great intentions, we knew that it would be difficult to keep students actively engaged with the app on a regular basis without a sense of reward and accomplishment. Leaning on gamification principles, we encouraged the students to consider mechanisms that would get them excited and interested in using the app on an ongoing basis. This process ultimately led us to a point system that would offer in-app stickers for completing walks and activities, such as in-walk challenges and streaks.
