I am a very sporty
person, and I love walking every morning, one the things that this new
explosion of mobile technology has brought us is the ability to keep track of
our exercising routines easily without having to buy additional hardware.
The Cardio Trainer for
Android is an application that allows you to track your exercise by recording
the time, distance and path (via the GPS functionality of your phone) where you
have exercised.
One of the issues I
found in the application is that on certain occasions it makes the navigation
confusing for the user. This happens specifically when you try to go back to
the main menu of the application by pressing the button “Home”. The issue I
found here is that the home button takes you to different places depending on
how you accessed the application. If you accessed but selecting the application
item in the phones menu, or by selecting the application widget then the home
button does take you to the main menu, whilst, when you enter the application
by clicking on the status bar icons (the reminders that you have to exercise)
then the home button instead of taking you to the main menu of the application
takes you to the home screen of your phone. This is very confusing for the end
user and gave me a hard time until I finally figured it out.
On the plus side, the
most convenient feature is the fact that it has the possibility to enable voice
output. Let’s face it, whenever you exercise and you have a tracking device,
one of the things that you constantly do all the time is checking your device
to see how many calories you have burned or how many miles you have travelled,
but this can be quite dangerous, particularly if you are using a bicycle or
roller blades. So the voice output in the application takes care of that issue
and allows you to indicate the time interval in which you want each
notification and the type of notification you want (i.e. Calories burned,
distance traveled, current speed), and notifies you without you having to be
distracted looking at the phone, and risking having an accident. This to me is
a very good example of how a good human-computer interaction can be used to
remediate complications from past products.
On a final note, I would say the product is
well designed in the way the interaction with the user is built. The user
experience feels very good, and the issue with the home button seems to me more
like a programming error than having actually been designed this way.
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