Coach + Club App / ux Design
The app was designed to fill a weakness in the current communication platforms for athletics clubs. Currently, clubs such as ‘Canning Districts Athletics Club’ use a private Facebook group to share and manage training schedules. This platform is limited in that the coach must exit the Facebook platform to communicate to a single athlete, and athletes don’t have the ability to log information in the group (such as personal bests or race times).
design stages
Unlike other fitness apps available, Coach + Club's focus is on communication. The athletes using the app already have a coach to give them workouts- they don't need a virtual coach. What they don't have is a platform to share information privately with their coach, and publicly with their athletics squad. As an athlete myself, this project was very much one of passion and gave me extra insight into what athletes and coaches need.
The first stages of the app design began with interviews. These interviews were conducted with all kinds of people, not just athletes and coaches. It was important to interview a wide range of professionals as I believe communication is a universal skill, and the app could learn from the way teachers or lawyers communicate, for example. Asking the right questions is very important to retrieve the right data. I wanted to find out how people are communicating, what issues they are facing and how they have solved those issues.
After sifting through the data collected and deciding on the main screens for the app, a task-flow diagram was drawn up to visualise the movements someone will take to navigate a task. This step in the design process highlighted particular tasks that may be too complex/time heavy to navigate and allowed me to design shortcuts for the user. One design feature, in particular, is the home bar at the bottom of the screen. This bar is placed at the bottom of the screen as mobile users will most likely use their thumbs to navigate faster. With the bar present at the bottom of all screens, the user can quickly shuffle between their workout schedule, notifications and log-book with one movement.
user Testing
The hardest part of creating an app or any UX design is the amount of user testing that is required to make the design as user-friendly as possible. This also becomes the most rewarding part, crafting a user experience that is fine-tuned, intuitive and beautiful!
Once I had decided what screens I needed to complete all the tasks within the app, it was time to test the designs function. This began by brainstorming tasks a user will need to take.
For example, when first opening the app, how will a user find their way around the dashboard. To solve this, I designed a user onboarding process that welcomes the user to the app and shows them where to find their settings, notifications, calendar and more. Once the user becomes familiar with the interface, they may want to send a message to their coach. This is an example of a user task. During user testing, I built an interactive prototype of the app that connected to my phone. I would ask the user to sign into the app, and then watch to see if the user onboarding is efficient at introducing a new user to the app. Other tasks I asked the user to complete included; "Create a new event in the calendar", and "You completed a competition goal, mark it off and set a new one". When conducting these tests, I made note of the amount of time it took users to complete a task, how many attempts it took to find the right screen, and any questions or remarks the user made during the task.
What I found difficult when testing the app was that a number of my participants were not athletes themselves. This was very apparent when I asked questions such as "Enter your PB". Most did not know that meant 'personal best' or that a PB would go in the competition tab. This showed me that there were areas of the app design that assumed users understood athletics the same way I did. In fact, every club may have different lingo and abbreviations for workouts and track sessions.
It also showed me that the app may not be user-friendly for very young athletes or older coaches. After conducting these tests, I went back to the design stages and made changes based off the collected feedback.