SoleMate
wearable and app to reduce sedentary behaviour at home
Project Overview
Submitted to CHI 2025 Student Design Competition, this project aimed to reduce sedentary behaviour at home. I led a group of 5 to conduct user research, synthesise user needs, ideate solutions and present our final product SoleMate to researchers. The paper was published in 2025.
Tools
Qualtrics, Figma, Miro, Excel
Role
UX researcher & product manager
Problem
Sedentary lifestyle has been common since the pandemic. Prolonged sitting can lead to body pain and long-term diseases. Although products aiming to reduce sedentary behaviour exist, few of them focus on home senario, as home is considered to be a place to relax. Therefore, we want to explore how to reduce sedentary behaviour at home among young people?
Outcome
We conceptualised and designed an app with slippers to raise users' awareness of sedentary lifestyle and break sedentary habits.
Procedure
We followed a linear working process, from identifying problems and understanding users to ideating, prototyping, and conducting user tests. We ensured the design process is user-centred, and the final product was iterated too better meet user needs.
We conducted 5 semi-structured interviews, collected 56 questionnaire responses, and analysed 5 competitor apps or tools using a diary study.
We found that users need:
-education of long-term harms of sedentary behaviours
- intervention to prolonged sitting without disrupting current activities
-engaging and interesting reminders
-access to accurate sedentary data
Understand Our Users
Ideation and Prototyping
The key challenge was balancing the effectiveness of reminders with seamlessly integrating into the home scenario. We brainstormed features of the product to meet users needs on Miro board. I led a meeting to decide what features to use and how to combine features into a comprehensive product. I also led the evaluation of low-fidelity prototype to enhance the usability.
↑ Brainstorm of features for user needs
↑ Brainstorm of forms of product
↑ 2x2 matrix to evaluate features
User Testing
To test whether our core features satisfy users' needs, I designed a Wizard-of-Oz and AB test. We compared different types of reminders, tested the effect of the avatar in education, and explored users' opinions on using slippers to detect sedentary behaviour.
Users did not react to either reminder.
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According to users' feedback, we decided to highlight the harms of prolonged sitting and present suggestions that fit in home scenario. We also received positive feedback on using the avatar to communicate knowledge and using slippers as sedentary behaviour detectors, demonstrating the potential success of SoleMate.
Users preferred quizzes with the avatar's reaction instead of pure text.
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Meet SoleMate, an app that reminds and motivates users to reduce sedentary behaviour, paired with slippers that detect sedentary behaviour.
Feature 1 - Slippers
Wearing additional devices to detect sedentary behaviour at home can be challenging. Therefore, we decided to turn slippers, something most people wear at home, into detectors. Our slippers measure sedentary time by analysing changes in foot pressure distribution and transmit the data to the app in real time.
Feature 2 - Avatar
Instead of plain reminders and education, SoleMate reminds and educates users using an avatar. Users can customise the appearance of the avatar, which deepens the emotional connection with users, encouraging them to follow advice from the avatar without feeling stress.
Feature 3 - Reminders
Reminders to instruct users to reduce sedentary behaviour are disrupting and not effective. Based on real-time sitting time, our reminders highlight the physical harms of sedentary behaviour using the avatar and suggest actions to stop sitting that fit in the home environment.
Feature 4 - Daily Education
To enhance users' motivation to reduce sedentary behaviour over time, SoleMate offers a daily quiz page to emphasise harms of sedentary lifestyle and suggests feasible solutions to reduce sedentary behaviour. Over time, users have adequate knowledge about sedentary behaviour and are more confident to reduce sedentary behaviour.
Feature 5 - Data Visualisation
Keeping track of sedentary data manually is challenging. SoleMate summarises daily, weekly and monthly sitting hours and highlights progress to encourage users reduce prolonged sitting.
Considering Context Early
SoleMate focuses on home scenarios and prioritises seamless integration into daily routines. Defining the usage context early in the design process is crucial, as it helps identify core user needs and align the product with users’ behavioural patterns.
Cross-functional Communication Takes Effort
Working with teammates from different disciplines is both rewarding and challenging. It is crucial to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Collaboration is not only working together but also learning from each other.
User Testing Drives Iteration
Direct user feedback is essential in shaping meaningful iterations. Balancing Thinking as a designer and understanding users’ real experience both contribute to a good product.
Reflection
Email|loriyanglyly0310@gmail.com
Tel|07423719572
Thank you for your time :)