One of my passions is attending rowing regattas. I have 2 daughters who are involved in rowing in different capacities and I never miss attending their crew events to watch them row. Over the years of cold, rain, cold and rain, wind and rain, and sunny beautiful skies, one of the things I have noticed the most is that I spend tons of time waiting around never sure of when my daughters’ boats will come across the finish line. The boats row 5000K down the river to the start of the race course, so determining when they will near the finish line is difficult at best.
I am currently working on the design of a rowing app to address the waiting issue and answer one of the biggest questions, “Where’s my boat?”. I have researched current rowing apps and adjacent competitors and am currently interviewing spectators, rowers and coaches to identify the desire for the functions I am imagining. None of the current mobile apps for rowing include the desired functionality of viewing the boats on the race course map in real time. Realtime tracking is an attractive feature for mobile apps.
My general users are spectator, rower, coach and recruiter. Some of my user stories consist of:
As a spectator, I want to find my rowers boat on the race course map.
As a spectator, I want to view the schedule for the day.
As a spectator, I want to select a particular boat and view details for that boat.
As a rower, I want to know what time my race starts.
As a rower, I want to view my race path to plan my race.
As a rower, I want to view my boat course after the race to see where I could improve.
As a coach, I want to view my athletes’ race on the map in real time.
As a coach, I want to view my rowers statistics.
As a coach, I want to view my rowers races after the race to plan better strategy.
I also want to include statistics collection and viewing to make the app useful for training purposes to the athletes and coaches and make it attractive to recruiters to help identify the most promising athletes. The desired functionalities determine the user flows through the app. There will be different membership levels to accommodate the different users. Coaches and recruiters will have paid memberships but parent and athletes will have access to free memberships.
Personas I am developing are a general rower persona, a general coach persona and general spectator persona.
I am currently working on user flows through the app. I will continue to update the app development and eventually publish it in my UX portfolio.
Comments are closed