FitQuest

Gamified Fitness App

Project Overview

Problem Context

Staying healthy is hard- especially when motivation fades. Many people struggle to sustain consistent exercise habits due to a lack of engagement, accountability, or a sense of progress. Research has shown that incorporating game-like elements such as challenges, rewards, progress tracking have significantly improved an individual’s motivation to achieve their goals. By using these elements, I hope to make exercising and fitness more enjoyable and sustainable for people.

Goal

FitQuest is a major project developed as part of my UX university studies. The goal was to create a gamified fitness prototype app that motivates users to build and maintain healthy habits through challenges, rewards, and progress tracking. Making fitness less like a chore and more like an adventure.

Solution

FitQuest introduces a gamified fitness experience that blends the nostalgic charm of pixel RPGs with users’ real-world health goals. By completing fitness “quests,” users can level up customisable avatars, earn rewards, and visually track their progress through achievements — transforming everyday exercise into an engaging and rewarding adventure.

Project Type

UX/UI, Research, Branding, Prototyping, User Testing.

My Role

UX/UI Designer

Tools

Figma, Aseprite,

Adobe Illustrator,
Maze co

Duration

12 weeks
Feb 2025-May 2025

Project Type

UX/UI, Research, Branding, Prototyping, User Testing.

My Role

UX/UI Designer

Tools

Figma, Aseprite,

Adobe Illustrator,
Maze co

Duration

12 weeks
Feb 2025-May 2025

The Solution

Set up your fitness goals

Users begin by setting personal fitness goals, which helps the app tailor workouts and track progress. This step encourages accountability and motivates engagement, while giving users a clear sense of purpose from the start. Designing this flow highlighted the importance of clarity and simplicity in goal selection, ensuring it’s intuitive and encouraging for first-time users.

Customise your avatar

Avatar customization adds a fun, gamified layer to the experience, allowing users to create a character that represents them in the app. Through selecting appearance, clothing, and accessories, users feel a personal connection to their progress. Including this step in the prototype helped me explore how personalisation and engagement intersect in the user journey.

Grow and workout with your Avatar

As users complete workouts and challenges, their avatar grows and levels up, providing visual feedback and motivation. This interactive loop reinforces habit formation and gamifies the fitness experience. Prototyping this feature helped me test how progression, rewards, and visuals could work together to keep users motivated over time.

Want to see how it came together?

The full design journey, including research, iterations, and testing, is best explored on desktop.

Research & Insights

Empathy Map

As someone interested in running and weightlifting, I already had a personal understanding of the challenges and motivations involved in getting and staying healthy. However, I wanted to gain a broader and deeper perspective of others’ experiences. To better understand my target audience’s motivations and challenges, I created an empathy map to visualise how they think, feel, say, and do when trying to get fitter. This process helped clarify their emotions and behaviours around fitness tracking and goal setting.

Competitor Analysis

Now there is no denying that there are fitness apps out there. To understand where FitQuest could stand out, I analysis six diverse competitors: Zombies! Run, Fitocracy, Habitica, Nike Training Club, Supernatural and Pokemon Go. Each offers a unique approach to motivation - from storytelling and gamification to guided workouts and immersive environments. Through this comparison, I identified key strengths across these fitness apps, including community support, engaging storytelling, and features that help build consistent routines.

At the same time, I saw some clear gaps — a lot focused on just one type of exercise, some had outdated interfaces, were expensive, or didn’t fully support broader fitness goals. These observations guided the design of FitQuest: a gamified, habit-forming app that motivates users through community connection while keeping overall health and wellbeing front and center.

SWOT Analysis

Doing a SWOT for FitQuest helped me see both its strengths and where it could improve. Its gamified experience, retro pixel-art style, habit-building mechanics, customisable workouts, and community features make it fun and engaging.

At the same time, I need to watch out for feature overload, extra design effort, and retention risks. There are exciting opportunities too — like partnerships, wearables, seasonal events, and mental health features — but also threats such as competition, user fatigue, tech limits, and privacy concerns. Overall, this analysis guided how I balanced fun, usability, and long-term engagement in the design.

Ideation

Early Sketch

After exercising, I grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen with one question in mind: how can I make fitness fun and motivating? Sketching a few early screens helped me shape FitQuest, blending gaming with habit-building.

Brainstorming

To explore ways to make FitQuest engaging and motivating, I spent time brainstorming ideas that could enhance the app experience. I grouped concepts around themes like wearables, social challenges, events, add-ons, personalised fitness, and customisable avatars.

This process helped me see how gamification, social motivation, and habit-building could work together to make the app more fun and adaptable to different users. The insights I gathered from this brainstorming directly shaped the early screens and feature priorities, ensuring that FitQuest would be both enjoyable and effective for users.

Pixel Design Moodboard

FitQuest’s visual style draws on pixel and retro elements, inspired by classic role-playing games (RPGs) and older consoles like the NES and SNES. By combining bright, playful colours with a clean, modern layout, the app balances the nostalgia of retro gaming with the clarity and usability needed for a fitness and wellness experience.

Fitness App Moodboard

Fitness tracking is a core part of FitQuest’s success. Recording health statistics and exercise data is fundamental to helping users reach their goals. Apps like Apple Health and Garmin Connect demonstrate effective ways to track fitness progress, while Zombies! Run and Digimon Vital show how exercise can be made fun and engaging. These inspirations helped shape a moodboard that blends accuracy, motivation, and enjoyment.

User Flows

For FitQuest, I wanted to make sure users had a simple yet thorough sign-up process, where they could confirm their personal fitness goals and create a fun, unique avatar. Once signed up, users land on the dashboard, where they can see their current level, health statistics, and avatar.

From the dashboard, users can navigate to five key screens:

Inventory – customize avatar appearance, items, and pets.
Leaderboard/Social – track progress and connect with friends.
Shop – purchase new items or environments for the avatar.
Quests – create, edit, and store workouts or exercise routines.
Start Workout – begin a session directly from the dashboard.

User Flows

This flow ensures users can easily access all core features, track progress, and stay motivated while keeping the app experience fun and engaging.

Wireframes

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

These wireframes helped me spot ways to improve navigation, clarify feature placement, and make the experience smoother and more intuitive before moving on to higher-fidelity designs.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

While reviewing the work, I realised adding a dedicated workout screen would make the flow more complete, letting users create, track, and start their exercise sessions.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

This set of low-fidelity wireframes was made to explore a clickable prototype for FitQuest. It walks users through the sign-up process, avatar creation, and onto the dashboard, showing the key interactions and layout of the main screens.

Visual Design

Typography

For FitQuest, the font needed to capture the retro arcade vibe while remaining readable. I chose High Score, which balances nostalgia and clarity, giving the logo a playful yet legible style. This ensures the text feels connected to the pixel-art, gaming-inspired identity of the app.

Imagery

Pixel graphics are central to retro gaming, so I made sure the logo incorporated a pixel-inspired style through its font, graphics, or both. I also ensured the pixel elements tied into fitness themes, connecting the logo to FitQuest’s purpose. This approach reinforces the app’s visual identity, evoking the nostalgia of classic arcade games while keeping the design clean, fun, and approachable.

Colour Palette

The retro-inspired colour palette sets the tone for FitQuest, combining bright, playful hues with balanced neutrals. These colours reflect the arcade and pixel-art aesthetic while keeping the app approachable and easy on the eyes.

Inital Logo Concepts

The first logo concept explored typography and pixel graphics together. The goal was to see how retro fonts and pixel elements could convey a fun, gaming-inspired identity while staying readable. This stage helped me identify which visual elements worked well and which needed refinement.

Final Logo Design

For the final logo, I refined the typography, pixel graphics, and colour palette to create a cohesive and playful design. The High Score font balances nostalgia with clarity, while the pixel elements reinforce the arcade theme. The trophy and heart imagery connect health (heart) and fitness goals (trophy), highlighting FitQuest’s main purpose. This final version clearly communicates the app’s retro-gaming style and approachable personality.

Sprite Concepts

While my main focus isn’t animation, I enjoy experimenting with pixel art and creating sprites for RPG-style games. Using Adobe Photoshop and Aseprite, I drew inspiration from tutorials and base templates to develop the style of FitQuest. This hands-on exploration helped me shape the game’s characters and visual identity, bringing the retro pixel aesthetic to life.

User Testing

Maze.co Platform

To validate FitQuest’s design and user flow, I conducted prototype testing focused on three main goals. Users interacted with the app through the Figma prototype to complete specific tasks and provide feedback on usability and engagement.

Prototype Goals:

Sign up to FitQuest – Users discovered the app through its onboarding screens and reached the Account Creation screen. This tested whether the initial flow was clear and engaging.
Set up your first fitness quest – Users set personal fitness goals, such as improving flexibility, mastering a yoga flow, or training 3–4 times per week. This step allowed me to evaluate whether the goal-setting process was intuitive and motivating.
Create your avatar and complete your first workout – Users personalized their avatars and completed a simulated workout to explore how gamification and progress feedback supported engagement.

This testing process helped me identify usability strengths, areas for improvement, and how effectively the gamified, retro-inspired design motivated users to engage with the app.