PRODUCT DESIGNER @ KITMAN LABS
Medical staff in sports need a way to document a programme of exercises and treatments for an injured player so they can return them to full contact training and games. All the work shown below was designed by me, working with Engineering (Front and Back) and a PM.
Overview
I share this project to highlight a few things:
- To showcase handling a large client and their needs
- The difference between a novice and power user
- The difficulty in building generalised software with conflicting user needs
- The changing nature of requirements based on latent unsaid needs
When we were engaged by the league body of the NFL to build a general purpose EMR for every team in the NFL, this specific topic, Rehab, was identified as the most important with regard to medical staff engagement. In an effort to learn about the topic we arranged a number of working group calls with medical practitioners in the NFL these ran over the course of a number of months. As a company, Kitman Labs provides generalised software for all its customers. There is the ability to tweak what is shown and not shown, but customisation is generally kept tight.
Thus, in this case we wanted, and it was agreed with the NFL, that we would provide them software but we would retain the ability to make decisions based on our wider user base i.e. soccer, rugby, cycling, cricket, boxing etc. With this in mind we took a decision to work with other sports and medical practitioners to understand their needs. In total we talked to 100s of practitioners and went onsite with 15 NFL teams, the IRFU, Chelsea FC and numerous other teams to get feedback on our ideas.
Discovery
Key Learnings
- Rehab begins the day of injury. Your body is recovering from day 0 and thus everything you do from that point on needs to be documented and logged for legal and healthcare reasons.
- Every injury is different because every player is different, but there are similarities.
- Staff generally have a high level plan in their heads, they will identify phases of progression and will start with a generic plan of exercises but these will need to be tweaked as the player reacts and recovers.
- Different environments have different levels of programming ability. At more staffed teams they can spend time with players. At less resourced teams, they will be working with multiple injured players through their rehab, so 1 to 1 engagement is reduced vastly.
- Medical staff have to document their data. Their request was to make it as quick and easy to use as possible.
- Exercise names are subjective and this leads to thousands of exercises. We documented 50,000 exercises which we spent a large portion of time reducing.
- Staff work on different time horizons. Day to day, they want to look at what they need to do that day, but at the start of the week they want to see the upcoming week, and on occasion they want to zoom right out and look at month or annually timelines, specifically for longer chronic issues.
Requirements
1. Multiple perspectives
Multiple views (1 day, 5 day, 7 day and month) for different use cases
2. Injury context
All exercises and information should be housed within the context of an injury
3. Scheduling
Need an ability to schedule appointments and rehab slots in a shared calendar
4. Reporting
A capability to report on progress for the player, coach and medical staff
5. Documentation
Legal obligation to document injury details, phases of rehab and assessments
6. Sharing
Communication and sharing of exercises to our, Athlete App, messaging tool and PDF
Design
The requirements from the feedback and user research covered so many areas that we wanted a high level prototype to share and get feedback on from all stakeholders before proceeding.
Broad Concept Prototype
The requirements from the feedback and user research covered so many areas that we wanted a high level prototype to share and get feedback on from all stakeholders before proceeding. This was done with our internal experts who are former/current practitioners and vetted with some ‘friendly’ users who were willing to give quick and honest feedback. It was also strongly guided by engineering feasibility and our current interaction patterns.
Feedback
- Broadly this was very popular with a lot European/Progressive physios / doctors,
- But this did not go down well with the NFL who had strong reservations of showcasing all of this to the actual user base, they wanted to concentrate purely on the rehab exercise views, which was the core workflow within the broader workflow.
Round 2
In response to the NFL perspective we condensed the designed down to the focused area and showcased some of the new work to the clubs in our on-sites.
Feedback
- This was a strong move forward, the NFL and clubs were happy we had focused on the rehab area, as this was 70% of there workload, but we were worried it wasn’t fast enough from an interaction perspective
- The aim now was to speed up the flow, the old system they used, although not great, was quick with regard power user inputs, emphasising speed and sacrificing negative space and elegance. It also used a lot of shortcuts and the clubs had 10 years of experience using it, so the aim was to beat that.
Round 3
It was 3 days to the NFL combine and we wanted to showcase that were taking on feedback from the clubs and updating our designs to match what they were asking for. I spent 3 days in a hotel room in New Orleans designing based on the feedback in round 2. We showcase the designs on the right
Feedback
- I had never been given so much positive feedback and never seen users, customers so happy with a direction.
- This was helped with the fact that they all weighted in on the journey. By the time we shared this version, in person to each club, at the combine, we had already talked in some form to everyone and gotten feedback, this helped a lot.
Development
The engineering team were constantly kept in the loop, and they were doing tech spikes as the designs changed, specifically around the drag and drop feature as this was far more effort and risky than anything else in the designs.
Inevitably we broke the work down from what is shown, specifically building the 1 month view last, all other views were the same. Shared here is the Figma file iteration breakdown.
A big effort was made with regard to the number of treatments and exercises, the NFL had 50,000. This was due to the quick input on the old system and the way each AT/Physio would have distinct names for similar things. We managed to get the list down to 20,000 and included some friction with regard to adding new exercises and treatments.
On top of this, things have changes, slightly, we have added in a lot shortcuts, included a cross view of all your injuries, so if a player has multiple injuries you can see all of the differing rehabs in one view, and some other minor changes.
Outcomes
This has been a huge success. The feedback from NFL staff (we’ve had multiple, multiple focus group and user interview sessions, along with the league feedback) and the ability to make this generally available to other orgs and clubs has generated lots of interest, engagement and positive feedback. It is a key selling point now when we showcase the product. That is not to say it can’t be improved, what has become evident is the extent to which requests for enhancements have come in via the field team and user interviews.
The quantity of requests is a marker of interest and engagement and so that has pushed us to develop a backlog and roadmap for the key items and to tie the rehab area to the wider system ie calendar, our staff mobile app, our athlete mobile app etc.
In moments like this, when a feature release generates such strong feedback it’s important to capitalise and drive home the advantage, to remove any incumbent competitors and provide even more value. That is what we are trying to do now with this.