Erika Stowe
I interviewed key project stakeholders such as the product owner and the technical team to find out their objectives, views of the product and how they define success.
Through these I was able to gain understanding of how the product is going to work as a high level.
How it works
Research of the competitor landscape was done to see how our product would disrupt the market. Some key findings were:
Most solutions were expensive to implement
Most solutions did not analyse on the fly and sometimes took days to come back to coaches
Nothing worked with AI to predict patterns and outcomes of games/players
Some competitor platforms
The objective was to learn more about the goals of coaches whilst coaching and analysing their players. As well as discover any behaviours, process, attitudes and context whilst coaching and analysing players.
6 x 45 minute interviews were conducted with tennis coaches
Coaches had an average of 12 years experience
Each session involved interview-style questions
Depth interviews with coaches
To gain some clarity around the insights generated through the depth interviews I ran an affinity diagramming session. This session was focused on finding patterns in the research and giving us some findings to start forming a product.
Affinity diagramming session
As a result of the research I could map out the coaching landscape including goals, context, mental models and behaviours. This helped to further clarify the opportunities for us to focus on.
The high level coaching process.
Some of the key opportunities to come out of the research were:
Information should be presented in ways that helps coaches do their job - they talk in strengths & weaknesses
Highlight areas of a players game for them to focus on
Coaches do not have time to assess all their players and feel frustrated by this
Investigate a way to show progress of a player - history of statistics over time
What they currently assess - footwork, recovery time/reaching shots, body language, placement/ball location, consistency, cleanliness, ball toss, 1st serve percentage, attitude
What they want to assess - forehand location, backhand location, % of serves, player position on court/footwork, errors (by shot type)
A customer problem statement was created so that we could begin the ideation process with the user in focus.
Through the ideation phase we are constantly asking ourselves how might we...
How might we help coaches easily assess their players strengths and weaknesses?
How might we help coaches know what to focus on?
How might we save coaches more time?
Initial sketch showing a possible approach.
Initial sketch
I decided that the best way to come up with a possible solution going forward was to have a co-design session with some of the coaches. The plan for this would be:
Get them to imagine themselves in a particular scenario along the coaching journey i.e during a game, pre-game, post-game or training
Present them with a rough concept of what the software could be
Ask them what they need, what is useful, what is missing
Concepts to be used in co-design session with coaches.
