The first assignment for Building Engaging Prototypes was to build a fitness tracker smart watch with an accompanying app on a smart phone. The app should have the following functions:

-start and stop tracking in response to user’s input;

-track the burned calories, traveled distance, and current speed;

-display this information in real time to the user;

-display tracked data per day/week/month.

For my first prototype, I decided to divide the functionalities between the smart watch and the smart phone. The smart watch would act as an extension of the phone app, with minimal functionality. The watch can start/stop the activity, track the calories burn, the distance travelled, and the current speed. The rest of the functions were placed on the smart phone. A user can thus track their progress and look back on their workouts via the smart phone app. The reasoning for this was two fold:

1. Offering minimal functionality allows the user to only focus on what they need to do with the watch without distracting them.

2. The phone has a larger screen real estate which makes it more suitable to display fitness information, as opposed to small smart watch screen.

For the actual prototype itself, I went online and got some Apple device templates for the dimensions, and I used those instead.

The feedback received was that my user wanted more functionality on the watch. They didn’t want to wait till they got home to look at their records (under the assumption that they are exercising without their phone).

In the second iteration, I decided to use the feedback and add more functionality under the guise that the smart watch app should be as standalone as possible, without relying on the phone app.

I found this assignment a bit challenging as I had a hard time visualising a fitness app. I feel I took too long with creating a paper prototype, and should have just started sketching instead of glossing over every single detail. The role of the paper prototype is to quickly create a draft of an idea, and the refinement process should be saved for a later stage.