SmartTrainer is a comprehensive UX design project that addresses communication and organizational challenges faced by professional athletes and trainers. This project represents a complete user experience design process from initial concept through prototype evaluation, developed as an Exam for the UX Design course at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI).
Professional athletes and trainers lack a centralized platform to:
- Access and manage training plans efficiently
- Track dietary and health guidelines
- Coordinate competition schedules
- Monitor athlete progress and compliance
- Streamline communication between stakeholders
SmartTrainer proposes a dual-role mobile application with dedicated interfaces for:
- Athletes: Access training plans, track nutrition, view competition schedules, monitor attendance
- Trainers: Manage team statistics, set dietary plans, update schedules, track athlete performance
- Questionnaires: Distributed to athletes and trainers to understand current practices and pain points
- Semi-structured Interviews: Conducted with swimmers and trainers (ages 14-35)
- Work Activity Affinity Diagram (WAAD): Comprehensive analysis of user activities and challenges
- 67% of athletes receive training plans in person, creating communication inefficiencies
- Majority of athletes don't use apps for diet tracking
- Trainers rely heavily on fragmented communication tools (WhatsApp, email)
- 27% of athletes lack reminders for competitions and schedule changes
- Target Users: Professional and amateur athletes, coaches, team managers
- Age Range: Athletes (14-30), Trainers (28-35)
- Sports Focus: Swimming, Alpine skiing, and other competitive sports
- Age: 20
- Role: Professional skier, European Ski Cup competitor
- Challenge: Balancing training with online university studies
- Needs: Streamlined health tracking and administrative task management
- Age: 28
- Role: Swim trainer at InSport RR, Milan
- Challenge: Managing competition registrations and athlete communication manually
- Needs: Centralized system for digital task management
- Training Logbook: For tracking daily activities and performance metrics
- Digital Agenda: Time management and schedule organization
- Nutrition Diary: Monitoring dietary habits and nutritional intake
- Centralized Dashboard: Real-time access to training plans and updates
- Nutrition Tracking: Diet logging with trainer oversight capabilities
- Performance Analytics: Integration with wearables and manual input
- Communication Hub: Streamlined trainer-athlete messaging
- Competition Management: Scheduling and registration coordination
- Tool Used: Figma
- Focus Areas: Four core tasks representing significant use cases
- User Roles: Balanced coverage between athlete and trainer workflows
- Manual nutrition data input (Athlete)
- Competition data visualization (Athlete)
- Training plan creation (Trainer)
- Competition calendar communication (Trainer)
- Cognitive Walkthrough: Step-by-step task execution analysis
- Pilot Testing: External user surrogates with human-computer simulation
- Issue Documentation: Critical incident tracking and user confusion analysis
- Figma: Wireframing and prototyping
- Paper Prototypes: Initial testing and validation
- Digital Drawing Tools: Storyboard creation
- Survey Platforms: Questionnaire distribution
- Interview Analysis: Qualitative data processing
- Affinity Mapping: User activity categorization
- User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ): Standardized UX assessment
- Think-Aloud Protocol: Real-time user feedback collection
- Heuristic Evaluation: Expert usability review
- Facilitator: Session guidance and interface explanation
- Human Computer: Paper prototype manipulation and interaction simulation
- Observers: Note-taking, error documentation, and qualitative data collection
- Researchers: User interviews, survey analysis, and persona development
Note: This project was completed as part of the UX Design course at Università della Svizzera italiana. All research was conducted ethically with proper consent from participants and findings are intended for educational and potential commercial application purposes.