EOS
Summary
Elites Optimization Service (EOS) is a company that provides career coaching to professional athletes reaching the end of their athletic career, or have finished their athletic career, to help them transition to the next stage of their life. When EOS began it's first pilot program everything was done over email - something that became a pain for athletes, but especially for career coaches who had to manage the schedules and assignments for multiple athletes.
Timeline
2.5 weeks. 1.5 weeks of research & synthesis, 1 week of designing.
Role on the Team
Main researcher and point person between our team and the client. Also worked with the team in creating the prototype and making key screens.
Technology
- Desktop website, as requested by the client
- Scheduling capabilities were integrated with Acuity
- Wireframes built using Sketch, prototyped in InVision
Research
In order to understand the problem space we were given, we began our research with user interviews, starting with our main stakeholders. We focused on asking them questions around the EOS business itself, the nature of the pilot program they ran, where their business was going with the new program they were running this year, and also what they want to see out of our dashboard.
We then moved onto interviewing the two main groups of users in the EOS service - the career coaches and mentors, who are in charge of teaching and helping the athletes in their transition, and the athletes themselves, who are using this program to grow and learn. We conducted 5 athletes that went through the program and 5 career coaches & mentors, with myself running point on scheduling the interviews, creating the interview questions, and running 80% of the interviews.
Along with the user interviews, we researched learning management softwares to understand the best ways to create a dashboard for a program of this nature, as well as researching other career coaching programs to see what was being done already. This research not only helped us understand what was convention in dashboard software that EOS was aiming for, and gave us better ideas for our designs.
Synthesis & Insights
With our 10 user interviews and 3 stakeholder interviews, we combined our data in order to learn the needs, behaviors, pain points, and goals of our users. By using affinity mapping to group different facts stated by our users, we were able to align what users said into useful insights.
From career coaches and mentors, the first thing we learned is that they had a hard time communicating with each other about their athletes, or to share their notes. Career coaches also found they had a hard time keeping athletes accountable for scheduling sessions or turning in assignments. It was a struggle to make sure that athletes were invested in the program and would keep going, so the biggest goal for career coaches and mentors was making sure that the athletes had "bought in" to the program and were willing to put in the work.
Therefore for the coaches, we had to make sure it would be easy for anyone to input information on assignments, notes, and to see their schedule and work their athletes had done.
From athletes, we learned that they loved the EOS program. Our athletes all had good experiences working with career coaches, but they had amazing experiences working with mentors. Two of our athletes consistently talked about their mentors and how they were always accessible and were very easy to talk to about anything, and how that improved how much they enjoyed the program.
What we took away mainly from the athletes is that the best behaviors that helped them be successful were taking notes, scheduling their appointments right away, and keeping to a tight deadline. Therefore, we knew if our platform would be successful for athletes, it had to help them do these things.
The following were the user journey I identified for the athletes in the EOS pilot program, along with the personas created from our user interviews of coaches & athletes to help us guide our designs.
Design & Iterations
In order to create the best designs, we followed the following process:
1. Prioritize Features. Our team discussed the things the client wanted, what users stated they wanted, the competitive landscape and points of opportunity we identified through our research.
Thanks to this research, we decided that the most important things to focus on in our designs were making an easy place for all coaches can follow athlete's progress and assignments, that scheduling is easy through the platform, and that coaches can keep notes on their athletes. For the athletes, we determined the most important things to focus on were the turning in and understanding of assignments, keeping and taking notes, and scheduling.
2. Run a Design Studio. A design studio is a team exercise that allows all members of the team to draw out their idea for a page or a flow, and compare it with the rest of the team, in order to collaborate and decide on how we want screens to look. By doing this activity together over the course of a day, we were able to come up with our first designs.
3. Create the screens and flows in a low fidelity of different tasks within the dashboard. We also create the prototype at this stage so it can be tested.
4. Usability Tests. Usability testing allowed us to put our designs in front of potential users of the platform and help us see whether or not our designs worked, and how they could be improved upon. For this project, we ran three rounds of usability tests on 13 potential users to identify potential problems and fix them.
5. Edit screens to reflect the results of the usability testing, and then usability test again.
6. Create the final prototype backed by our usability tests.
Final Design
Next Steps
With a dashboard design laid out for athletes and career coaches, we had a few other next steps possible based on the business goals of EOS and what we heard in our research.
1. Do further research with athletes who did not complete the program. This can help illuminate their experience, which would be different than the athletes we interviewed throughout our two and a half week sprint.
2. Find a way for athletes to connect with one another via the EOS program. Athletes love the ability to meet others and learn from them - and it is possible that athletes who are all in the program together might be able to boost each other up to complete the program as well. It would require more research but is an interesting hypothesis to look into for the future.
3. Create a dashboard for the leagues to view athlete's progress. For business purposes, I worked on the design of the league dashboard in October, all of which is detailed here.