2024 — Massey University (4th Year) — Mobile Design — UX/UI — Illustration — Animation
Burger Burn
This major project lasted 24 weeks, including 12 weeks of research and a follow 12 weeks of design creation. During this time, I explored fitness applications and attempted to gamify fitness in real time using smartwatch biometrics. Burger Burn is a playful attempt to make exercise slightly competitive and less serious with three fun calorie-burning challenges.
Researching current fitness apps and approaches, it became abundantly clear that the aesthetic and visual style is predominantly sleek and modern, generally lacking any personality and feeling rather sterile. Burger Burn's tone and target audience are younger adults but also anyone wishing to gamify their exercises with others.
One of the leading precedents for this project is Duolingo, which has successfully created the largest online language-learning community. Ultimately, they have gamified learning and consistency through a streak and other gamification design elements. The user experience/interaction, design elements, illustration, and animation style are simple and easy to understand for all ages, which inspired me to do the same for a fitness application.
Created using Illustrator, Premier Pro, After Effects, Figma and Procreate.
Walkthrough Video
The Research
Design can facilitate the gamification of calorie burning utilising motivational theories for younger adults.
Throughout the research and design process, the concept has changed many times; however, it has always centred around making exercise more accessible, fun, and attainable for those who find traditional exercising methods challenging to sustain.
Initially, the idea revolved around strengthening the training process between a personal trainer and a client. This led to research about the barriers to accessing personal trainers and the tools they could use to make their client's experiences more beneficial and personal.
In researching these barriers, I had the idea of substituting personal trainers with a free personal method that gamifies individual workout progress—a 'Duolingo' for 'fitness ', so to speak. I still want to attempt this idea today; however, for a 24-week solo project, it became apparent that even mocking up this concept to the degree of detail and execution I wanted would not be achievable.
The concept then pivoted again to gamify the exercise with community competitions and validate personal progress with a tangible object one could compare their exercise to, which gave rise to Burger Burn.