Hi 👋, we're team SOLO

Project Sponsor: Jenelle King

Angelic Le

Connor Lee

Daniella Park

Kele Fong

Stephen Lee

Our Product

Over the past two quarters, we worked on SOLO, a mobile application designed to help track and field coaches by centralizing the different tasks they have. Currently, track and field coaches are responsible for training 40+ athletes with little to no assistance. They have to manage various track and field events, plan personalized workouts, and record training data. SOLO helps coaches juggle these challenges with the click of a button.

Development Process

Our start

Our team continued from the previous team’s work. We were given designs, research, and some development work. After review, we decided to iterate on the designs and do more research but restart the development process.

After reviewing the initial project, we continued to develop the designs and conduct research to help us design to our audience. This consisted of analyzing competitors, making user personas, and conducting stakeholder interviews.

Understanding Our Audience

Because SOLO is unique in its target audience and functionality, we analyzed apps with similar objectives: workout apps, running apps, etc. Our goal was to understand design alternatives for SOLO’s main features as we brainstormed more intuitive ways for users to complete user flows. We focused on analyzing the most popular designs for creating and displaying workouts, viewing workout results, and tracking training data. Based on our partner's expectations, our team finalized these actions as the central features of SOLO, and we prioritized them for the duration of our project.

Competitor analysis of similar training and workout applications

Meanwhile, we developed user personas to help us understand who we are designing for. Track and field coaches and athletes are a niche target group with extremely specific needs, so incorporating our interview findings about coaches experiences and struggles increased these personas' accuracy.

Personas for coaches (top row) and athletes (bottom row)

The Beginnings of Code Development

Alongside our design research, we began brainstorming code design. Our main concern was maintaining our program to be readable, reusable, and overall transferable for the future teams who would work on this application. That was one of our initial challenges as the code from the team before us didn't meet most of these qualities. Thus, one of our first decisions was to start fresh from the programming end.

Creating a UML diagram helped us organize our code. Complex projects require complex code, so we took the time to divide the program into reusable classes. In this way, we were able to break down code dependency from the beginning to avoid messy complications further down the line.

UML diagram of SOLO's structure

Stakeholder Interviews and Updates

After researching and designing every week, we met with our project partner to review the work that was done, receive feedback, and show any progress updates.

Code Development and Refactoring

As we started to solidify our designs, we began development and learned our technology stack. We had to learn as we added more features and refactored them. Development also revealed holes and limitations in our design which we then included in our next iteration of design.

Challenges

We encountered various challenges throughout this project, ranging from development bugs to research blocks. The most notable challenges were figuring out what tech stack to use, deciding future flows, and gathering design feedback especially from coaches. We attacked these challenges by considering the value in our design decisions and also prioritizing most important tasks first. We were able to logically come to the conclusion of what to use and work on and what decisions to make later. Decisions that we decided to make later we tried to design so that the future decisions had as much room to work with as we could give.

Evaluation

We conducted 2 rounds of usability testing with track and field coaches to observe how they interacted with the app and gather feedback directly from them. In the first round, we conducted testing with the initial prototype the previous team developed, asking the coaches to perform the main tasks they would need to complete to get started with training, so we could pinpoint key pain points we should address in the core features of the app.

Some of the key pain points we addressed include:

Amount of information on some pages were too overwhelming
Buttons were overlooked as they were not easily discoverable
Some terms used in the app were not familiar to coaches

Using the feedback from the previous round of testing as well as information we learned from conducting the competitive analysis, sending out surveys to coaches, and discussing with our partner during weekly meetings, we redesigned the core features of the app, as seen below. Once the new prototype was completed, we conducted a second round of testing to see how the changes affected coaches' experience and pinpoint any areas that future teams could work on improving.

Some areas of improvement include:

Ensuring icons clearly represent purpose of page they lead to, adding labels if necessary
Ensuring button labels clearly convey function of button while remaining concise
Using colors and icons to highlight buttons and input areas

Final Product

A working demo mobile application
AWS Database and middleware
Github repository
Application designs and future considerations

Create Account Page

A multi-step form to guide new users through a series of questions to collect their registration details. Users progress through steps by providing answers, with options to navigate backward if needed.

Coach Home Page

Central hub for the coach displaying workout management tools such as a Start Training button, Create Workout button, a calendar to navigate to previous and future workouts, and the main workout cards that show the assigned workouts for the current day.

Workout Builder

Tool to create and customize a workout starting from the warm-up, to the main workout itself, and ending with a cooldown. The user is able to search for drills done in the past or add in a new drill while choosing between a set distance or time.

Active Workout Page

Displays a list of today's workouts as expandable cards, allowing users to start a workout to reveal a timer and action buttons (Stop, Lap, End Workout) or view workout details which leads to a pop-up. It also features a "Completed" state for workouts that have been finished.

Active Workout Pop-Up

This pop-up appears during an active workout to allow users to track time, shift between workout phases, and assign recorded running times to specific athletes. It provides an interface for associating performance data with individuals.

View Workout Page

This page presents the complete structure of a selected workout, detailing its warm-up, main workout, and cool-down phases, along with the specific drills and quantities for each. It serves as a detailed reference for the workout's components.

Profile Page

This page allows users to view and manage their personal information, settings, and to see their rosters. It serves as a central hub for user-specific data and customization.

Application Screens

Application Demo

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