Baseball Little League: Facilitating seamless communication between Coaches and Parents
Sponsored project through Purdue University
Client: Tim Porter
Product Sector: Sports, Communication
Team: 8 UX Designers where I was responsible for stakeholder conversation and prototyped the onboarding state for our users
Duration: 4 months
Deliverables: Presentation, Documentation, and High - Fidelity Prototypes
In our kickoff meeting with Tim Porter, we learned that the League aims to reduce the rates of children having to drop out of his Little League program due to a lack of effective communication between him, his coaches, and all of the parents. With our help, they hope to provide parents and coaches with a better organizational experience next season.
Repetitive Alerts
Sending multiple emails and text messages about league events.
Update Constraint
Inability to send schedule conflict notifications.
Interruption in Parental Planning
The lack of visibility in game schedules leaves parents with insufficient time to make proactive decisions during schedule conflicts, preventing them from having their children attend games or from managing drop-off and pick-up times.
Channels of Communication
Messages
Reduces the stress and mental capacity to read or respond to messages
Calendar
Plan and schedule around the kids league events
Competitive Audit
How are apps intended for organizational communication fostering organizational alignment?
While considering the question above, we analyzed more than 3 applications within the communication sector in sports. Most platforms utilized a messaging system, a native calendar feature, calendar integration, channel announcements, and more.
Our interviewee mentioned that regularly, when there are games or practice cancelations, at least 26.6% will still show up to drop off their children even after communication of the cancelation had been initiated hours ago.
Our team talked to a former member of the board of the organization to understand how communication tends to fall through, identify current communication flows, and identify potential areas of improvement for communication from a former board member of the organization.
*these questions were tailored to a former board member of the Little League Organization*
Our Key Interview Questions
How would you currently rate the forms of communication, do you see any pitfalls or areas of improvement?
How often do you encounter communication issues, how often do parents show up to canceled practices?
Who do the parents reach out to when they run into these issues (coaches or other parents), what have been their reasonings for not getting updated with canceled events?
We synthesized the insights from our interview and the competitor audit into an affinity map to help form design ideas to solve the miscommunication issue.
“ The challenge is…. Everybody has one source of communication some people like texts, some like emails, or some folks want to go to Facebook.” - Interviewee
Based on the affinity map, we generated the following insights by grouping similar takeaways into an overarching themes.
2. Proactivity
Without tournament schedules, parents struggle to proactively plan for days they would have to call off work to watch their children play.
3. Standardization
Coaches do not have a standardized way of informing parents about urgent matters such as the cancelation of games.
Availability
Manage who can attend and cannot attend
White board affinity diagram (Click to enlarge)
1. Accountability
Coaches need to be made aware of how many players in the squad are available or will be absent from practice, game and tournament.
Shortcomings + a new direction for a more pragmatic solution
Initially, the team explored a web platform, but our interviewee revealed that the current web platform is mainly used for game schedules and past results. Following team discussions, we shifted to a mobile app as our solution, aligning with the prevalent use of mobile applications such as GroupMe for communication, and the likes of Team App.
Inevitable, Unavoidable Tradeoffs
Tradeoffs are inevitable when collaborating within a team, especially in a project with numerous design possibilities.
Initially, the time framing process was presented vertically.
Navigating how to best curate the coaches’ announcement page to engage parents’ concerns easier.
Dropped the vertically time frame layout to horizontal, making it more efficient.
Final Screens: Coaches 🎉
Coaches, with the help of these three features, can holistically deliver information to parents in a concise manner.
Announcements
Quickly report conflicts within league events
Final Screens: Parents 🧑🧑🧒🧒
Parents lead busy lives, and these features offer stability in their lives while dealing with league conflicts and events.
Onboarding Experience
Login
Reflection + Next Steps
This was a project where I learned a lot from my teammates who I worked with during the duration of this project, each one of them contributed to the knowledge I will continue to carry on through my journey. Here are a few things I’ve learned:
Inaccessible target audience: For our interviews and testing, It took a lot of work to find current or past coaches and parents who understood the communication challenges in a Little League Organization. This made me aware that sometimes for a project improvisation will be an opinion if a user group is unreachable.
Hierarchy within the Team: A team led by students with more experience to lead the team allowed me to understand, learn, and watch the upperclassmen facilitate activities, and meetings with stakeholders, and understand the design thinking process. I am truly grateful to my team leads for pushing me to champion stakeholder meetings and desk critics.
The Design Process Is Not Linear: As my first experience project, I was introduced to the design process which I began to understand was crucial to the commencement of any project. Moreover, through the case of the project, I realized that it was not a linear process since there were instances of refining our designs from testing, and conducting more research for inspiration.
More testing: If I still had more time for the project, I would’ve conducted Heuristic testing, which was recommended by our Professor, to examine whether our solution met the expectations of our users and areas of discrepancies between existing apps and ours.
Future Ideas: For our solution to remain more relevant, the team would have loved to incorporate these futures that we had brainstormed during the semester. However, due to time constraints, we couldn’t. Some of these ideas were:
DocuSign Feature: This would improve the current experience for coaches and parents to easily share and store documents like Emergency, Medical, etc
Syncing Calendars: This would help parents and guardians to be able to plan time off from work or other activities ensuring that they can actively participate in their child’s or children’s game.