Tiffany's Guide to Navigating the Fung Fellowship: A Personal (Public) Diary

 Previously, from last assignment creating a digital prototype of my product: For this assignment, I took to the streets (my mutuals and fellow active watch users) to interview three people about my product and see how it could influence their lives! Since I didn't have a physical prototype with me, I led my three chosen peers through a mental exercise, asking them to close their eyes while I explained my product to them and described how each feature would come into handy whether they were new to digital watches or avid Apple and FitBit watch users.  My goal for this interview was to see whether or not my product would be unique enough with the features I've implemented to actually convince users to want to buy into it. To be honest, I feel as if my own product isn't very unique in any sense, it just takes the best parts of most watches on the market and combines it into one product. But even then, I feel like there are similar products to my prototype. Regardless, I devel...

 For this assignment, I took to the digital drawing boards to continue prototyping my idea. I utilized WebSim, a tool that David introduced to us earlier in the semester, to help with my digital prototype. I decided to use this tool instead of Figma mainly because it was easier for me to pull out shapes to correspond to different features of the watch that I wanted to illustrate. In the end, I decided to keep very basic features of the watch I wanted to maintain, in terms of health metrics. I then decided to add particular features to the watch that would make it my ideal digital watch: an OLED screen and a control interface that would act like a condensed user dashboard. The latter feature is most convenient for me because when I think about running, I don't want to micromanage the screen of my watch and have to find a "record" button or "start" button. There are features I can customize and add to this dashboard that would allow me to click a physical button a...

      Having had the opportunity to analyze various users' experiences with the Apple Watch, this week I take a chance to reflect and sit down with my drawing board to summarize my findings and pick some key points to focus my solution on. As a recap, one of the common complaints that many Apple Watch users who were also avid gym-goers, shared was their confusion over such high health metrics after only an hour of lifting weights. Others compared their hour of weightlifting with a peer who ran for an hour and simply could not understand how their weightlifting session surpassed or was close to the metrics of their peers who were running.      The first part of my ideation process was doodling for 15 minutes on a sheet of paper, which I did in my Good Notes app on my iPad (because everything is digitized nowadays and also because it feels better for the environment at this point). For this first page of doodles, I focused on the user, the product, and the va...

  Image Credits: Flickr     Last week, I had the chance to narrow down my research scope pertaining to the Apple Watch and its reliability. I honed in on opinions and perspectives of various watch-users, some from Reddit, others scoured along other areas from the internet. This week, I work to narrow down on my problem statement by focusing on a priority  "How might we...?" question.     To recap, I initially began my investigation with the question, "Do Apple Watches accurately measure calories burned during workouts aside from cardio?" because I am an avid user of the watch but also wanted to know whether or not my weightlifting sessions were accurately being accounted for. From my independent research, it seems that many users felt that the watch overestimated their calories burned during strength training sessions. The watch itself calculates calories burned based off of heart rate and assumes that the "resting" in between strength training session...

Picture Credits: Pexel This week, "the rubber meets the road", as my instructor David states in our most recent assignment description. To further my exploration of the Apple Watch's accuracy in fitness measurements, I developed a research plan and came up with a set of interview questions to ask potential interviewees. However, since my schedule was plagued with loads of computer science assignments and two midterms during the last two weeks, I wasn't able to execute the interviews. Instead, I decided to dig a little deeper into some potential forums and other search sites to see if I could potentially answer some of my own questions without speaking to an executive directly.  To start, I developed three big questions that I could potentially ask to drive the direction of my customer-product research: How reliable and accurate are the Apple Watch's fitness tracking features, especially in terms of strength training and alternative forms of exercise, compared to i...

  Picture credits: Trusted Reviews In May, my boyfriend gifted me an Apple Watch as an early birthday present. At the time, the spring semester had started to settle down and although finals were well on their way, I had more daylight hours to go outside and touch some grass. In April, I had set forth a goal to walk at least 10,000 steps everyday. I am proud to say that I was able to keep that streak for five months (for reference, September hit me like a bus and I am currently failing to maintain that streak, so I think it will end soon). During that time, I have been consistently using my watch to not only track my steps but also my active calories and heart rate. On average, I can walk 10,000 steps in approximately 4 miles. I average a mile in 20 minutes via brisk walking. My heart rate spans 100-160 beats per minute (bpm) depending on the terrain, my speed, and breathing patterns, amongst other variables. For the most part, these numbers have been consistent because the watch b...