Product Designer
Product Strategy, UX Design, Interface Design, Prototyping
Contract
2019
Preception is an early-stage startup whose mission is in leveraging technology to measure and train awareness and decision making for professional athletes.
I had the privilege of joining the team as they were embarking on the mission to obtain venture capital investment and was tasked with developing an MVP for their analytics dashboard.
Former professional soccer player turned coach for the Vancouver White Caps FC, Leigh discovered that the difference between the elite and average athletes lies in their ability to understand and shape the environment around them to ultimately make the right play.
In his book “Preception” Leigh details the different facets of developing these skills, ultimately leading to the founding idea for Preception.
My role was primarily to work with the CEO closely on defining our product strategy along with translating preliminary research insights into mocked up high fidelity deliveries of our MVP.
Furthermore I worked alongside our lead engineer from the very start to ensure we were in alignment throughout the process. We used methods like rapid prototyping to communicate interactions and real time collaboration within our design tool for early feedback on technical feasibility.
My involvement with the project ended once the final design was approved and handed off successfully
The team had conducted preliminary research before I joined, therefore I focused my efforts towards gathering insights that directly relate to the product and our users.
In addition, technical constraints helped inform the final design and trade offs had to be made on specific aspects of the product that would require more time to build.
Unfortunately doing first hand user testing with our target audience proved a lot more difficult to coordinate. Therefore I utilized the dogfooding technique to perform usability testing amongst my team.
The primary metric we used to define success was very unique. Leigh's primary objective was to secure venture funding and he felt that having a polished prototype that could clearly communicate its' purpose would help in that.
How can we better understand an elite athlete?
Most commonly known for its implementation in military training, it turns out the OODA loop is also very much applicable to the professional sports' analysis of athletes. This framework allows us to better understand the individual steps that an athlete takes to make a decision every millisecond.
While we can easily identify which players are better than others through standard statistical measures, they are not vey good at showing us WHY they're better. The OODA loop gets us a step closer.
The first phase of the project began with me trying to frame and understand the problem while also getting to know our target audience. I wanted to know why this was important and how it fit within the grander scope of datas' utility such as training regimens and its' role in the business of professional sports.
Have a deep understanding of the problem space and our target audience by learning how they currently view the problem and what current methods they use to solve it.
1. How do they currently solve this problem?
2. How would they leverage this data?
3. How important is this problem to them?
4. Would athletes train differently with this type of data?
5. What is the business outcome of solving this problem?
Experience and eye maturation of trainers has been the traditional form of measuring this type of data.
Kevin Harmse
former mLS player and current SFU coach
From a business perspective, data is used to show a players value when it comes time to renegotiate a contract. This not only solidifies it's business utility but furthers the importance of showing more detailed metrics that can tell the whole story.
Training is a huge aspect in how data is utilized. It became clear that current methods of training didn't cater to developing decision-making skills, and it was because the specific metrics needed to measure were ones not easily identifiable with the current tools being used.
For athletes, training usually involves some sort of physical activity. But what happens when an athlete suffers an injury? Not only does it cease them from performing; But when they return to play, they usually require time to get their body back to game shape; Because of that, training your decision-making can help balance out what they may lack in physical ability with better decision making.
Professional sports teams have difficulty making the mental aspect of their sport more tangible and actionable within their current training methods.
After gathering the data I needed, I then mapped the insights-In conjunction with the problem statement to not only define our user but also help inform our product strategy moving forward.
We determined that there were two primary audiences; the athlete and the training staff; We decided to focus on the athlete primarily because their motivations are at the core of our mission.
1. Organization politics
2. Lack of opportunity within team
3. Adapting to change in coaching
4. Media
1. Return from injury
2. Lack of job security
3. Contract negotiations
Using the data we've gathered, we were able to identify two core components that would make up our feature set for our MVP.
1. Wearable tech
2. Video Analysis
3. Analytics
4. Custom simulations
During our competitive analysis we determined the following. Our competitors are very strong at one specific thing but when you bring those together, you then have the solution that truly solves our users pain points.
How might we help make decision-making training more tangible to improve performance
Leigh (Left) and lead engineer Taric (Right) during early prototype testing
Displaying the same information in various ways provides a really digestible view of the primary key performance indicators.
Every key moment is captured and displayed in video format for easy review alongside the key perfomance indicators
While this project had some set backs due to hardware issues, we ultimately sought out to measure the success of this project by gathering a net promoter score from our usability tests.
One of the biggest lessons I took away from this project is the importance of validating ideas with your target audience. I learned that resources are tightly held by stakeholders and as a result we as designers have the responsibility to find creative ways to block assumptions from being the compass of a product.
