Forward Strides - GR3

Prototype Photos

This is the toolbar shown at the bottom of every page.  It allows quick and easy access to the four main pages: Workouts, Groups, Input Times, and Data.

This is our calendar page, used in several of the tools.  It serves to help you pick and plan workouts and is an effective and safe visual tool.

Workouts

An example of the workouts page.  Here you can select a new workout, or edit the existing workouts.  The section in the center is a pop-up for creating new workouts.

View Data

This is an example of a selection screen with drop down windows.  The date selection range at the bottom takes you to the calendar page. 

This is our chart page, where users can chart the progress of their athletes over time, as well as compare athletes against each other.

Input Times

This is an example of our workout selection page:  This will take you to the stopwatch page once you make a selection.

This picture is of the first stopwatch page that we made.  The icons at the bottom of the page are present on all pages and serve as a navigation bar.  (They are omitted from the other images to save space.) 

This is our improved stopwatch page, where we removed the stop command and moved the start command up to the top of the page, closer to the instructions.

Briefing

"This is Forward Strides. The purpose of this interface is to assist in the process of inputting and viewing athlete performances and workouts. It is primarily for coaches, specifically in those sports with time-based performances (track, swimming, speed skating, etc.). Here are your tasks."

Scenario Tasks

1.  
   1. Create a group named "Long Distance Swimmers"
   2. Add athlete Joe Bish to the group "Long Distance Swimmers"
2.  
   1. Create a workout for "Long Distance Swimmers" on March 18th
   2. The workout should be titled "1 Mile Swim" with 2 repetitions
3.  
   1. Time Joe Bish's first repetition of the "1 Mile Swim" workout on March 18th
4.  
   1. View Joe Bish's results for his workouts between March 11th to March 18th

Observations

Takeaways From Critical Incidents

• Due to lack of feedback, users weren't sure exactly when Tasks 1 and 2 were complete
• There were learnability issues with up and down arrows for collapsed and expanded tabs. Users were confused that pressing an up arrow would expand, not collapse, a group
• On the timing page, placement of stopwatch controls were too far away from the stopwatch. This caused users to skip the instructions of how to take down times, resulting in them clicking the wrong thing when attempting to time an athlete
• We had a safety issue with the timing page. User pushed the reset timer button in order to try and save the time for an athlete. There was no way of reverting this action besides repeating the workout, which is unreasonable in a real life situation
• Filter searchbox in Task 4 confused users, as they did not know what inputs it would accept or why there was a need for one
• Users were confused about what to do after entering in the name of a group or athlete; Enter button vs clicking away vs other method
• There were learnability issues with our titles for the menu bar at the bottom. Users first instinct was to press "Workouts" when trying to take down times for a workout, but the workout button is for setting up workouts and to take down times the desired tab on the bottom is "Input Performance"

Positive Feedback

• People liked the 4-item menu bar at the bottom of the app, as it was simple and looked nice
• Though there was room for improvement regarding its learnability, once people understood the timing mechanism (tapping an athlete's name to take down his/her time), people liked the concept and implementation

Additional Points of Concern

• When viewing a graph of past performances, how do we show multiple repetitions in a workout? IE. Joe Bish has 2 repetitions of the 1 mile swim during the workout on March 18th. Do we put 2 data points, 1 average data point, other solutions?
• What does the performance graph look like with multiple athletes, multiple workouts?

Prototype Changes

• Changed the collapse/expand arrows from up/down to right/down. This removed confusion about what the arrow represented and is more consistent with other applications the user may have seen
• We moved the stopwatch buttons from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen under the timer itself. This way users quickly associated the timer and its controls with one another, and the vertical flow of the page required the user to read the text below
• Greyed out name buttons during the timer page until the timer is started, preventing users to arbitrarily click user names beforehand
• On the "View Performance" page, instead of clicking a group and having it pop up a list of athletes, changed this to a collapse/expand section. There is a checkbox and a button "Select all" on the group header to allow selection of all athletes in the group quickly. If all athletes are manually checked, the group checkbox is also checked to indicate the entire group is selected
• Changed filter at the top of the graph page to be less obstructive
• Reworded some headers to be more consistent with our structure (Select Group(s) to Select Athlete(s) on the view data tab)