Step City: Transforming Physical Activity into Urban Adventure

Academic Project

Program Bay Area Immersion Program
Role Product Designer
Timeline 5 Weeks
Team 5 Product Designers
Tools Figma

Step City is a mobile app designed to transform everyday physical activity into a gamified urban adventure. By combining real-world exploration with virtual city-building mechanics, the app encourages users to discover their surroundings while staying active. User research and iterative design refined the concept into a more intuitive and engaging experience that better addressed users' needs.

Challenge

Our team was challenged to uncover and design a solution to a user need.

Starting with the Pain Point of Traversing Hills in San Francisco

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.

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. While my first instinct was to try to salvage Hill Kill, I realized that doing so would amount to patching a concept that never addressed what users actually needed.

Using Research to Move from Hill Commuting to Broader Fitness Motivation

Rather than focusing narrowly on hills, we expanded our research to explore broader health and fitness motivations, reopening the discovery phase. 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 developed the following persona:

Fitness Phil

A young person who recently moved into a new city, seeking both physical activity and urban exploration.

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?

Designing Step City to Make Fitness Feel Like Urban Exploration

Our answer was 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."

Feature #1: Step Stations

Visit real-world locations to unlock virtual blueprints of landmarks. Step Stations are placed throughout the user's city and designed to encourage users to explore their local community, making the experience more than just a fitness app.

Feature #2: Quest-Based Rewards

Complete physical challenges to earn building materials, with more difficult quests yielding greater rewards. This feature creates a direct link between working out and in-game progress while encouraging users to push themselves to earn more rewards.

Feature #3: City Building

Use collected materials and blueprints to construct a personalized virtual city. This feature provides users with a visual representation of their fitness progress while allowing for personalization.

Feature #4: Progress Milestone

A central monument showcasing the user's ongoing achievements and helping them track their progress.

Feature #5: Social Interaction

Visit friends' cities, trade materials, and collaborate on quests together.

When we presented Step City to users, we received the opposite response: they loved it. Users were excited by the idea of building a city as motivation to stay active, saying it made exercise feel more purposeful and engaging.

Reflection

Key Takeaway

The project reinforced an essential design lesson: initial ideas must be validated with users. When our initial concept failed to resonate, we pivoted, returned to user research, and ultimately developed a much stronger product that better addressed user needs.

What would I do differently today?

Start with user-centered research. Our biggest mistake was getting attached to a solution before fully understanding user needs. The time spent developing Hill Kill should have been spent talking to users.