The Fitness App Notification Redesign
A team is designing a fitness app for Year 11 students. In user testing, 8 of 12 students said the daily reminder notification was annoying, but 10 of 12 said they wanted to be reminded to exercise. The team's first design sends a notification at 7:00 am every day. The team also found that students who exercised in the evening ignored the morning reminder. The app must work on low-end phones with limited storage and must not collect location data. The team has one week before a school showcase.
1. Identify the conflicting requirements in the user testing data and explain how the team should resolve them.
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The data shows a conflict: most students want a reminder, but most also find the current reminder annoying. These are not contradictory if the annoyance comes from timing or frequency rather than from the reminder itself. The team should treat the two findings as separate requirements: keep a reminder function, but change when and how often it fires. The evening-exercise finding supports this, because a 7:00 am reminder is mistimed for those students. The resolution is to make the reminder time configurable or based on when the student last exercised, rather than fixed. This satisfies both findings without dropping either requirement.
2. The team proposes adding location tracking to improve reminder timing. Evaluate this against the stated constraints and recommend a decision.
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Location tracking conflicts with the explicit constraint that the app must not collect location data, so it should be rejected regardless of its potential benefit. It would also increase storage and battery use on low-end phones, conflicting with the second constraint. A better approach uses data the app already has, such as the time of the last logged workout, to choose a reminder time. This meets the timing goal without new data collection. The judgement here is that a constraint stated by the client is not a preference to be traded away; it bounds the solution space. The team should document why the location option was rejected.
3. With one week before the showcase, recommend what the team should prioritise and justify your answer.
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With one week, the team cannot rebuild everything. The highest priority is the reminder timing change, because it addresses the largest user complaint and is a small, testable change. Storage and privacy constraints should be verified, not redesigned, since they are already stated and can be checked with a quick test on a low-end device. New features should be deferred. The justification is risk: a small change that fixes the main complaint is more valuable at a showcase than a large change that may not be finished or tested. The team should also keep a simple fallback, such as a fixed but user-chosen time, in case the smarter timing is not ready.