Requirements

Requirements

Main focus

For the personal health tracker establishing requirements for the app is important because we need to be able to narrow down what area of health we want to focus on. For our app though we would ideally want to focus on all areas with a huge focus being on the app having features that would be considered all-in-one. The areas of focus we’re looking at is a timetabling system which plans exercise routines and meals around your lectures and workshops, a nutrition system where you can follow custom meal plans or see some of the most popular meals as well as other features and finally an exercising system which is like the nutrition system in a lot of ways like designing custom routines that can also fit around your timetable for the day. The span of this app would start small mainly looking at local universities targeting students and/or gym enthusiasts, the hopefully if the app starting gaining traction taking the app more public so more students could have access all over the UK. 

Timetabling system

The requirements for this system would look at making sure the system can support both manual and automatic updates to the timetable for example automatic updates could happen to your timetable if you had your university account linked to our app, this ensures that if a slight change happens to your timetable it will alter e.g. lecture has been cancelled. As for manual updates this focuses on areas that are outside of your university timetable e.g. doctors appointment. Looking at the 2 main features of the timetable system brings up more problems for example designing a simple UI that everyone can use with ease, for this system we think that designing a UI that people agree works should be one of the top priorities and to also make sure that the UI for this area of the app is consistent with the rest of the app.

Nutrition system

Like mentioned with the timetabling system we need to make sure that the UI is consistent but I do also think that having it pretty much copy the timetabling system is a no go because then people may get confused with which area of the app they are actually using. First off designing a base UI for the nutrition system, the reason for this is because there are so many sub-areas that go into this system fitting them onto one page may be possible but it isn’t wise because that would then make the whole page cluttered and hard to navigate smoothly. Having sub-pages for different areas of the nutrition system I think is a must and something that would improve the area dramatically making it easier to see what you want. On the main page it will display a food diary which displays what calories, protein, fat and carbs you have had for the day, the way these are update are by the sub-pages I previously mentioned where you can input the food and drinks you have had. Other requirements I think is to display the users next meal on the page so they’re always updated on the matter and also other suggestions for meals that they may like or want to try.

Exercise system

This page is probably the easiest for users to be able to understand because the main exercise page only consists of an option of a variety of exercises, and selecting one of these options will take you to a sub-page giving the user a description of the exercise and if the user decides they like the look of it they have the option to add the exercise to their routine. Having this simple design makes the users experience of customising their own routine easy and efficient.
Users
All of the systems that are mentioned above on their own can work easily but getting them together and in a working state is just as important as getting them to work on their own. How is this important to the users? the users need all of these systems to work together efficiently because if not and if one system happens to fail it has an impact on the rest of the systems. We need to have our intended audience also laid out before we progress into the design stage, this is important because finding an intended audience is important and can drastically impact the design and features of an application. With what we're planning to design we can actually target many different audiences and draw in multiple people with what we're promising feature wise. The timetabling system may draw people in who don't have time to exercise or cannot use their time wisely, all they would have to do is to put in their details of the average weekly schedule and let the system sort the schedule out. The nutrition system could specifically target people who want to eat healthily but don't know how to design a balanced diet, our system would be able to help them find meals that suit them and also make them eat healthily. The exercise system could target people who are looking for personal trainers without the commitment or payment of having an actual one, our system can design an exercise routine around the individuals strengths and weaknesses. With different audiences targeted though there is a perfect or an intended audience that we have in mind which is a a busy student who can't balance exercising and finding time to design balanced diets, the reason this is the ideal audience we're targeting even though it would be a very specific audience is because this targets all of our areas and would ensure all of the areas on our app would be targeted and used.  

UI

To reiterate what I have previously mentioned having a consistent UI is important to the app but we don’t want it to be too consistent in the way the user is unable to differentiate what page they’re on.