Base Camp is a mobile application that provides athletes with efficient ways to streamline communications, build a close training community online and adhere to a regular training schedule.
I conducted desk research, analyzed 7 user interviews, created storyboards and user journey map to understand user pain points and identify design opportunities. I also created information architecture, sketches and wireframes to visualize our design.
+ Storyboards
+ User Journey Map
+ Information Architecture
+ Sketches & Wireframes
+ High Fidelity Prototypes
In-person athletic training has been largely replaced by remote sessions during the pandemic. This shift has presented challenges for student athletes, who have expressed difficulties in maintaining motivation and personal accountability. In addition, coaches are concerned about the team's performance since they are unable to closely monitor the training sessions.
As the global pandemic suddenly hits the US in early 2020, many of the routines we maintained were broken lose. Student-athletes were experiencing different levels of physical and mental hardship. Due to the mandatory quarantine and large-scale lockdown, student athletes had a hard time maintaining and improving their physical performance with the loosely structured training schedule at home and a lack of team bonding sessions.
To gain a better understanding of the challenges faced by coaches and student athletes during remote training sessions, we conducted in-depth conversations with 2 coaches and 5 student athletes. Despite the fact that remote training sessions were hardly an ideal replacement for in-person training prior to the pandemic, our conversations yielded valuable insights that we were able to synthesize into three key findings.
A supportive and competitive environment can serve as a powerful motivator
A lack of structure and routine makes training at home more challenging
Tracking performance is crucial to the athlete's training experience
To gain a more profound understanding and build empathy with our target audience, we created two primary personas to contextualize our research findings.
Kelsey is a student athlete who is currently training from home because of the new COVID-19 health guideline. Kelsey has a hard time staying on top of her schedule and keeping herself motivated when she's not in a team environment. She is worried that she won’t be in her best shape for the new season when returning to the field.
Mark is a coach who leads a team of student athletes at a community college. After the lock down, he still sends out schedules to the team but no longer gets to guide them in person. Mark has faith in his team but also wants to keep an eye on every member to make sure that no one is lagging behind.
By creating personas, we gained a deeper understanding of Kelsey's unique challenges and daily struggles. Now we want to identify some key moments in her day where our product could make a meaningful difference and provide her with the support she needs to thrive. We crafted a user journey map for Kelsey and map out her actions and corresponding reactions in a typical training remote training day.
With a refined problem statement, I identified several key design concepts that could address the problem at hand. We brainstormed and narrowed down the concepts to the most feasible ones that aligned with the project goals and user needs. These concepts provided a clear direction for our design progress, ensuring that we're designing a solution that will truly meet the needs of our users.
Encourages positive competition among teammates
Streamlines team communication
Allows users to easily track and share progress
Prior to creating high-fidelity prototypes, I worked with the other designer in the team to implement a centralized design system to ensure cohesiveness across our design. We carefully selected a bright orange as the primary color to convey a sense of passion and energy, which we believe will resonate well with our users. In addition, we chose a modern sans serif font that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also easy to read, making it more engaging for our users. By implementing these design choices, we aim to create a consistent and visually appealing design that provides users with a positive and profound experience.
With clean visualizations on the home page, athletes can see their training progress and personal goals at a glance. By highlighting achievements and milestones, we aim to motivate our users to stay on top of their training schedule and keep them motivated.
Team leaderboard encourages a sense of healthy competition among athletes to help them achieve their fitness goals. By showcasing the progress of each team member, athletes can see where they stand in the ranking and strive to climb up the leaderboard.
The community dashboard provides a centralized space for athletes to view updates from their team. The chat rooms allow them to share progress, offer encouragement and support, and ask questions. These functionalities will foster a sense of community and keep athletes in touch when they can't be physically together.
Due to the pandemic, we had to shift all of our collaborations online, which posed a significant challenge with the various uncertainties that came with virtual communication. However, as a team, we worked hard to establish meeting times that were suitable for everyone and meticulously planned out our tasks by assigning clear roles and setting achievable goals. Through this process, I was able to hone my skills as a team player and develop a greater appreciation for the benefits of virtual collaboration.
Initially, I struggled to separate myself from the end-user when analyzing user interview data. However, through the process of organizing and analyzing this data, I began to recognize patterns in the users' needs and gradually move away from my own biases and preconceptions. By letting go the intuition to think "I would want this if I were..." and focusing more on the user's true desires, I was able to identify valuable insights and explore new potential features for our application that would truly benefit our users. This experience taught me the importance of empathy and objectivity in the design process and underscored the need to prioritize the user's needs above all else.
Due to time constraints, we were unable to conduct usability testing during the project. However, if we have the opportunity to continue developing the product, I would prioritize conducting usability tests to gain a deeper understanding of the app's value to the target user groups and identify opportunities for future development. By doing so, we would be able to iterate on our design solutions to deliver an exceptional user experience.
