Step City: Transforming Physical Activity into Urban Adventure

Step City is a mobile application designed to transform everyday physical activity into an engaging urban adventure. By combining real-world exploration with virtual city-building mechanics, the app encourages users to discover their surroundings while staying active. The concept evolved through multiple iterations based on user feedback and research, ultimately creating a solution that seamlessly integrates exercise into users' daily routines while providing clear progression and social interaction opportunities.

Hills & Initial Inspiration

Our team's journey began with a simple observation about urban life in San Francisco - hills are universally considered a miserable part of daily commutes. This sparked our initial question:

How might we make commuting on hills less like a chore and more like an adventure?

This led to our first concept, Hill Kill, a mobile game where users would climb real-world hills to defeat virtual hill-themed monsters. With excitement, we presented this early concept to potential users for feedback.

Pivot: Facing User Reality

The response was sobering. Users didn't connect with our hill-slaying concept:

“Why would I log into it and not Apple Fitness?”
“Why not just use Pokemon Go at that point?”
"I wouldn't go out of my way to kill a mountain on an app. I wouldn't go out of my way to download it. I wouldn't feel excited."

This critical feedback forced us to reassess our approach and return to square one.

Research-Driven Redirection

Rather than focusing narrowly on hills, we expanded our research to explore broader health and fitness motivations. Our interviews revealed three key insights:

Time Constraints: Most people struggle with consistent exercise due to perceived lack of time
Social Motivation: Exercise becomes more appealing when it includes social elements
Engagement Factors: Users are motivated by fun activities and visible progress

From these insights, we came up with the persona Fitness Phil - a young person who recently moved into a new city seeking both physical activity and urban exploration.

Reframing the Challenge

With deeper insight, we reformulated our guiding question:

How might we transform physical activity for young people from a time burden into a seamless, delightful experience with clear progression milestones?

The Solution: Step City

Our answer is Step City - a mobile game where players build an imaginary city by physically exploring and exercising in their real-world environment. The tagline captures this perfectly:

"Grow your city step by step, by stepping out into your city."

Key Features:

Step Stations: Visit real-world locations to unlock virtual blueprints of landmarks; Step stations are physically placed throughout the user’s city

Quest-Based Rewards: Complete physical challenges to earn building materials, with more difficult quests yielding greater rewards

City Building: Use collected materials and blueprints to construct a personalized virtual city

Progress Milestone: central monument that visually represents the user's ongoing achievements

Social Interaction: Visit friends' cities, trade materials, and collaborate on quests together

After completing our final prototype, we presented Step City to designers from Atlassian and New Computer, a start-up led by a former Apple designer, whose invaluable professional feedback helped us to further refine our concept in order to enhance its impact.

Major Takeaways

This project highlighted an essential design lesson: initial ideas may not resonate with potentiall users, necessitating a pivot and a return to the drawing board. By adopting a more thorough, research-driven approach, our team developed a much stronger final product that effectively addressed user needs, making physical activity both purposeful and enjoyable.