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 one of the biggest questions, “Where’s my boat?”. The identification of this pain point is the basis for the Regatta App to track boats on the race course in realtime.
User Research
I have researched current rowing apps and adjacent competitors and have interviewed 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. There are several apps that contain this feature for running and biking but no rowing apps.
User research consisted of conducting stakeholder interviews, interviewing current rowers and spectators, heuristic inspection of competitor apps and comparative analysis of gaps in competitors products. Some potential competiting apps are Regatta Central and Head of the Charles. Observations of user research revealed good patterns such as consistency in colors and fonts, layout of screens and relevancy of information architecture. Negative patterns identified consisted of inconsistent or non intuitive navigation and the inability to save favorite races. None of the apps contain a live tracking feature.
User Stories
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
Personas I am developing are a general rower persona, a general coach persona and general spectator persona.
Sketches
I created sketches from my user flows. User flows include a membership phase and regatta selection phase and the regatta viewing phase. Some of the initial sketches are included here.
The main desired feature of the app is the live viewing feature and ability to select and track favorite boats during the race. This feature will require the addition of geolocators to each boat for it’s journey.
Prototyping
The Power Ten Regatta App continues to evolve after the first paper prototype. Wireframes for the 2nd iteration are ready for testing. The navigation icons have been revised and made consistent throughout the app. The membership phase has been eliminated for now due to questions from the initial paper prototype testing. Regatta spectators and rowers were tested and all had questions about the validity of the membership levels. Some of the other major concerns consisted of questions about privacy for the rowers data. More research is being performed at this time to insure the rowers data and rights are protected. An opt out process will be created and added to future designs for the athletes.
The focus of the app is on the live race and boat location feature at this time. All spectators, rowers and coaches that tested the paper prototype were intrigued by the live map location feature and thought it would improve the regatta experience. These wireframes will continue to evolve after the next testing phase with a high fidelity prototype at the upcoming fall regattas.
Usability Testing Round 1
Initial testing of the wireframe prototype have revealed some issues with navigation and boat selection is not intuitive. I am adding information on the boat selection process in the next iteration. Comments from users also indicated that adding labels to the icons would clarify the icons. Navigation needs to be improved to return to the main menu from all screens. Users were able to easily find the start times for races and specific clubs and athletes. The map feature was successful for boat identification.
Final Screens for 2nd high fidelity prototype
Labels have been added to the icons to improve usability.
The boat labels have been changed to improve understanding and improve aesthetics
Instructions have been added to the Select Boats screen
