Product Discovery: How to Increase Sports Participation Through Technology
By: Ari Wardhana
Tags: User Research, Design Thinking, Productivity, Product Discovery, Ui Ux Design

Sport is basically a physical activity that is needed by humans to support their health. But nowadays, the importance of physical activities is underestimated by the community due to their busy schedule at work or campus which has taken up their time. By taking case studies in Indonesia as the basis for research and also my homeland, I try to do a research on this issue.

Problem

Basically, the lack of awareness to do sports is based on my own problem. I tend to be lazy to do sports because there is no specific motivation that can make me interested in exercising. In fact, various reasons such as “busy” or “no time” become obstacles for me to do sports. But, the interesting thing based on my experience is that if I am invited to do sports with my friends such as playing basketball or futsal, I rarely will refuse. In fact, with my various activities, I will find the time to play basketball or futsal with my friends. Sometimes I’m only invited to jog, and I am still interested.

To find out more about this, I also tried to do some research and get some findings. The BPS (Central Bureau of Statistics) survey states that the number of Indonesians who routinely do physical activities is only less than a third of the total population (around 27.61%). A survey entitled “Healthy and Active Lifestyle” initiated by Fonterra Brands Indonesia and the Indonesian Osteoporosis Association (Perosi) shows that 4 out of 5 Indonesians do not exercise regularly and the “no time” reason is their biggest obstacle. The data also shows that Indonesians still spend 10 hours a day in activities such as sitting, working at desks, and spending time driving. This phenomenon shows that people participation in sports is still relatively low. It seems that awareness of healthy living is not priority.

Based on research in the International Journal of Sports Psychology and Performance, the case study conducted was to compare the duration of time between an individual running and a group running competitively with the same track distance of 10 km. The result is that people who run in groups and compete each other have faster travel times than people who run solo. In addition, other research findings also show that people who do a physical activity together with other people do these activities twice as much as people who do physical activity alone. By doing sports together, they also feel more connected to other people and get social support which makes their mental health better because they can socialize at the same time.

Hypothesis

Based on the findings, I found a pattern similar problem to my personal experience: A person will have an interest in exercising and even the intensity of their exercise can increase if done in a group or together with other people. Therefore, I have an idea to build a platform to find friends or partners to exercise together, especially for team sports such as futsal or basketball which cannot be done alone. As a first step, my team and I tried to do research by setting a 2-week timeline with the following stages.

Research Process

1. Empathize

In this first stage, for me, this is a slightly difficult job because I try to do research by using my personal problem and experience as a starting guide. I am afraid that this could cause my research to be influenced by the subjectivity at hand and in fact diminish the objectivity of the research itself.

To start this stage, we try to do several stages with the following scheme.