Coachbase Basketball Practice Planner
User experience design for Apple Watch and iPhone.
About the product
Designed for basketball coaches, the Basketball Practice Planner App offers ready-made practice plans, hundreds of new and innovative drills, intuitive animations and audible time reminders to help coaches build practice plan in seconds.
Mission
I was responsible for enhancing the user experience of the iPhone app using user feedbacks and data.
I also designed the Apple Watch app to help coaches on the go.
Try it now
Get it for iPhone and Apple Watch
Team
iOS UX/UI Design: Theo Tsai, Tracy Tam
Apple Watch UX/UI Design: Tracy Tam
Development: Jimmy Kong, Coachbase Team
Period
Sep 2015 — Dec 2015
Challenge
After launching, a big amount of testing data and feedback were received. As the content enriched, the user experience of finding and learning drills needed to be improved.
Besides, according to our observation, phones weren’t portable enough when coaches were teaching on the field.
Enhance the iPhone app
Solutions were designed by problems. Working collaboratively with Coachbase team, a great amount of firsthand data and feedbacks from NBA coaches were collected. A/B test and interviews were used to validate the effectiveness of the solution.
A more personalized home
The previous design conveyed a cool brand image. However, the information users could get from it was rather limited. We noticed from the data that, 92% of the users were not staying in the home tab for more than 5 seconds. Besides, better and better contents were required from return users. Coaches could not receive enough encouragement to provide more valuable contents to the platform. To solve the problem, a design with more personalized information and recommended content was applied.
Find drills easier
The number of drills was more than 1000 after Coachbase team completed the drills list. The previous solution of a simple search was not enough to help users to find what they want.
The main problem was, different people had a different habit of naming the same drill.
Therefore, search recommendation and filters were designed to improve the experience.
Learn drills from video
In most of the drills, Coachbase team provided a video or animation for users to learn. However, the video clicking rate was as low as 4%.
20 coaches were interviewed and I found out that, they were interested in the content, but the position of video button was hidden.
A/B test was used to find the best position of it. The clicking rate was raised to 97% eventually.
Design for Apple Watch
Problem
The iPhone app was launched first. When watching how users using it in the real life, a problem was quickly observed.
Here were the scenarios:
Scenario 1:
A coach designed the practice plan beforehand for his players. During the training, he started the practice plan and time of each drill.
It went well until the coaches wanted to demo himself for the players. The coach put their phone, walked into the field, did the demo and came back to pick up the phone to continue the players’ training.
Scenario 2
A basketball player designed his own practice plan. He kept outside the field and started the practice plan.
During a series of drills, he was behind for a few seconds when recalling the details of the drill. The timer matched less as less as he practiced. He had to stop to picked up his phone and restarted from where he was.
From both scenarios, the users experienced interruption because of one thing: no one carries a phone to basketball practice. What do they use?
Smart watches.
Ideate and test
In smart watches, the determining factor of usability is the information presented within the device.
The sooner users read and understand the information they want, the less interruption to their practice.
To ensure that, I and Coachbase Team setup testing to gather feedback from users.
Design Outcome
