Overview

CLIENT

A startup with an idea to build a new mobile app that seamlessly facilitates the scheduling and management of figure skating students.

CHALLENGE

To be successful in their business, figure skating coaches handle managerial tasks such as scheduling lessons and keeping track of payments. Many coaches spend up to several days a month creating a coaching schedule with their clients. Many coaches also don’t have a good system to keep track of the payments they receive from clients.

OUTCOME:

A clickable prototype

TOOLS:

Mural, Sketch, Overflow, Pen and Paper

My Role: 

User Researcher, Product Designer

Goal: 

Design a native app that helps coaches schedule lessons and keep track of payments.

User Research

To kick things off, I interviewed the company co-founders. I used the information from the interviews to define the project objectives. In addition, I performed market research to learn about similar existing products. Through my initial search, I learned that there are many other scheduling apps and one that stood out to me was an app customized for figure skating coaches. This app was Coach Concierge. Being a figure skating coach myself, it surprised me that I had never heard of this app before. I started with a heuristic evaluation to learn more about how the app worked.

From my conversation with the stakeholders and initial market research, I learned that my priority is to gain a better understanding of how figure skating coaches schedule their lessons and keep track of payments.

Objective: to understand how figure skating coaches scheduled lessons and create ideas for future app prototype designs.

For this project I wanted to try a new technique for creating interview questions called Question Cloud. Instead of a traditional script the format gives you an opportunity to easily go from one topic to another in the interview.

After conducting eight interview I synthesized and analyzed the data to draw out insights that I presented to the co-founders in a Mural workshop format. 

Some important things we learned

1. The most frustrating experience for coaches is rescheduling lessons with their students.

2. Coaches have a hard time keeping track of payments that they are receiving from students.

3. Coaches prefer paper calendars because they can accomplish critical tasks better than electronically.

4. Coaches often spent time sending lessons reminders to their clients.

5. Coaches use the method of communication that is most convenient for their clients.

6. Coach Concierge, was not solving some key problems figure skating coaches are having in running their business.

User Story Mapping

I applied the User Story Mapping process to translate key insights I learned from the potential users into a product.

PERSONAS

I used the qualitative data that I gathered during the research to create four personas Alyse, Sarah, Elna, and Ann. Two of the coches were part-time coaches and the other two are full-time coaches. Alyse is a 35 year old figure skating coach who also has a full-time day job. Sarah is a full-time student. Elna is 56 is a mother. Ann is a 33 year old coach who had no other commitments.

VALIDATION

The user insights and personas helped me write problem statements for each persona. After writing problem statements I moved on to validating my persona needs. To test the coaches’ needs I developed three landing pages each containing different value propositions.

Before sending the landing pages out to figure skating coaches I asked for feedback. The feedback helped me recognize that there was too much content per page and that most coaches would never look at landing pages.

Coaches always seek advice from their community and not from a website.

Instead, I created three brief videos introducing coaches to three different apps, each one with a different value proposition. The feedback I received from the videos helped me validate my assumptions.

Summary

The user story mapping process shown below helped me generate problem statements and create to be scenarios. To be scenarios helped me come up with ideas for first round of wireframes.

Ideation

Looking back to the to-be scenarios, I began making my first round of wireframing. Sketching initial wireframes helped me think about the architecture of the app.

USABILITY

In order to validate my designs, I created a prototype in Marvel App. I conducted informal user testing, which helped me change some of my initial designs.