Practice Plan App
For the Interaction Design course, our capstone project was to come up with an application that addresses a need.
For my application, I decided to do something to address a need with youth sports in our community, and anywhere else. My children play youth sports and have practices multiple times a week. We noticed that some practices run smoother than others, and that often practices went past the scheduled end time or that the kids did not get to do everything that was planned for in a practice. This is especially an issue in the winter when the fields do not have lights and the sun sets much earlier.
In looking at how some of the coaches we have met run their practices, there are a variety of methods, from typing out a schedule and handing them out to coaches of the drills and players to just winging it and coming up with drills on the fly.
No matter what preparation though, it seemed like keeping on task and schedule was a regular issue.
So I decided to work on an application that would help in this endeavor to make sure the kids get the most out of a practice, the coaches get the most out of the players, and that parents get their kids home in time for dinner.
The Practice Plan App aims to assist coaches in not only creating a practice plan, which can be done on any piece of paper, but also sticking to it with helpful reminders, timers and alerts.
Starting with storyboards and looking around for inspiration from existing applications, I quickly cam up with a list of what I wanted to accomplish with the Practice Plan application and started with some paper prototyping.
Paper prototyping helped get me from a long list of features down to a minimum viable product (MVP). I needed the user to be able to create Teams for which to apply their practice plans, the Practice Plans themselves, functionality for alerts and auto playing through the plan, as well as a way to share the plans.
With that information in hand, I began prototyping using Adobe XD. This is the first time for me using Adobe XD, but it worked very well for mobile prototyping. I came up with a home screen first, and then some basic screens to full fill the functionality in MVP.
At this point I started running into my own bad design decisions. I wanted to drive the user through a linear process without much chance to stray. However, as I had people take a look, it seemed like the more I tried to narrow the path for the user the more they wanted to be able to stray.
Initially I was going to not have team icon at the bottom be available until the user started the process of creating a Practice Plan, but since a team was needed to assign the plan to, this imploded. So I reworked it so that users could make a team from the team screen or from inside the practice paln creation process.
One aspect I thought would hinder usability is the lack of instruction, but in online user testing, the button text and flow was enough for the users to accomplish the task with all of the respondents rating the ease of use as very high. When I added text instructions into the mix, it only seemed to add more time to accomplishing the task.
Above you can try the prototype for yourself. Next steps would be to figure out a content provider for the drills themselves, either partnering with a training facility, youth league or just allowing users to contribute their own content.