Mental health and physical health are starting to gain respect as an intertwined pair, and as any athlete knows, health is closely tied to performance. I’ve spent the last year dealing with this dilemma- juggling multiple apps for training, doctors appts and results, and mental health updates. The time and energy it takes to communicate between everyone has been exhausting and inefficient. Add in the challenge of figuring out why an injury occurred or what led to an unexpected race performance and it’s a guessing game with a lot of emails.
I started looking at training apps. They allow coaches and athletes to communicate workouts remotely and easily upload and track data. But there isn’t an app that allows you to track your mental and physical health alongside that training. If health is such a strong indicator of performance (it is), then shouldn’t we have that information readily accessible from the app?
In the beginning
I started asking around. Some coaches said that it’d be valuable to see when their athletes’ physical therapy is happening, so they can plan complimentary workouts that don’t interfere. I talked with athletes that not only wanted to share dates of appointments but who thought it’d be useful to be able to update results. It’s can be hard enough to remember what a doctor said about your pulled muscle in the office, let alone relay it back to a coach- the person who may have the greatest impact on whether something heals or gets reinjured. As I’m a vocal advocate for mental health in athletes, I knew that there must be a space for this too.
For this project, I wanted to find a way to include resources for a coach to offer mental “workouts” too, including visualizations and mental exercises geared toward performance.
Journey map
I looked into use cases and tracked the feelings and thoughts of potential users. For this first journey map, I analyzed the path of a coach, who is training an athlete remotely.
And I scoped the landscape.
I had a few key takeaways:
- Color-coding (and only color-coding, no images) is necessary. There’s so much information at once and color can be a powerful tool for distinguishing events.
- Multiple views are also necessary. Users will need content for every event, whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
- Focus on the order of importance. Whether it’s the home screen items or the actions in the scheduler, the most important functions and information should be the most visible.
Turning an idea into a flow
In this flowchart, I took the most important functions for this app and made paths that a user would take to navigate those functions. I focused on the scheduling feature and backed away from the context of athlete and coach. My first task was understanding scheduling apps as a whole and the process of searching, adding, and editing.
Bringing it to life
Step 1: Brainstorm.
The goal of these initial sketches was to go through as many designs as possible.
From these sketches, I was able to discern that I’d have to be selective about which actions I allow a user to perform. With a form-based field such as adding and editing activities, it would be challenging to fill out on a mobile app. I determined exactly which functions would be the most sought after and streamline the entire experience.
- Search
- Recently viewed
- Resources
Step 2: Start the build
I began this process with wireframes, drawing each screen to scale. After feedback sessions with the sketches, I was able to make adjustments and further decide which screen was most likely to best meet the user’s needs.
Step 3: Prototypes
This prototype was geared toward understanding the flow and finding holes in the experience. In this version, I noticed that there were several navigational errors that didn’t make sense for an app. It was my first experience designing for mobile so there were hurdles that I never would have noticed without a prototype experience.
Step 4: Testing
Calendar apps are already tricky to use on mobile, so making one even more complicated would take an understanding of the current pain points. I took several test subjects through the prototypes, to see what their experience would be.
I asked questions geared toward their current experiences and pain points, hoping to create a more positive experience with my app. I also questioned their interactions with the prototype namely challenging what they expected to happen at each step and comparing it to my intention. As scheduling apps are fairly common, there was not too much confusion but I had several key takeaways I plan to implement moving forward:
- Three of the five people said the most important part of a training app is the day and content assignment. People are less concerned with time or titles of events, so that information would be noisy.
- Two users noted that stats and features would be nice on a desktop app, but for mobile, that information is secondary to a scheduling feature.
- All of the participants explicitly commented on the calendar views. There must be the ability to switch between daily and monthly views at ease.
Final thoughts
When this experience began, I was deeply concerned with the content and looking to help coaches navigate health in addition to their athlete’s training. However, after boiling down what my goal was, I realized it wasn’t a new app, just an iteration on apps that already exist. In the end, I think the competitive analysis and the prototyping were a great way to build my understanding and I think this app still has a viable future and would add value to athletes and coaches worldwide.
