How do we make it easier for handlers to do their training?

A Certified Nose Work instructor was looking to make it easier for her competitive students to track their training and progress. Detailed notes about training help the instructor trouble shoot and pinpoint areas for students to work on, but many felt down git on paper was time consuming and cumbersome. She wanted to remove the barriers for tracking their progress and make it easier to get the data for improvement. 

I created the user flow, screen layout and UI, setting hierarchy and order, and visual design elements for the developer to implement from. I worked directly with the client to refine the requirements and iterate during development and testing.

Planning Phase

Kick Off

The developer and I met with the instructor to get a sense of what she was looking for. She had created paper note pages (printed from a word document) to track her own training. Her students started requesting these printout pages, but found it took too long to fill it out during training. 

One student dad her husband follow her during training to fill out the pages while she trained. the instructor saw this as a barrier to entry and gap in success for both her and her students. 

Research

I asked the instructor for a few other instructor’s names to discuss how they approach this training with their own students. The outcome was that each teacher made their own paper handouts but most had the same information. 

I also looked in the App Store and play store for apps that might already be out there. I found interesting specialized training apps for things like biking and running but not Nose Work.  

Design Phase

I started by going to a class from the instructor to watch her and her students in action and talk to the students. I wanted to get a sense about how the students worked and what they would want out of an app.

I looked at the hand out and reorganized the questions into categories. I talked with the developer about if he could get the weather data for the location and have that auto filled. From there I created the first low fidelity prototype of screen flow and question order. 

I went over this with the instructor. She wanted a reorganization of the hierarchy of data. After a long discussion I redesigned the flow and I brought in the developer so he would understand how to structure the data base. The instructor signed off. 

Implementation Phase

The developer took the low-fidelity flows and created the UI in app form for the instructor to try out. This initial build we had the instructor test out and use for a week, during her classes and training.

Challenges

Once the instructor had used the first build she understood why the first design had multiple scents organized by location instead of individually. She wanted to go back from her last redesign request to the first design. This would be re-doing the data base architecture. 

The developer and I explained the impacts of this and how this change would impact the timelines. After straightening out the logistics the developer rebuilt the architecture and created a new build. The instructor preferred this original mapping much better.

Deployment Phase

The developer made weekly builds to deploy to the instructor and have her test out. From her feedback we made improvements with each build. 

After refining it over 6 weeks with the instructor we added the other instructors to the alfa test. 

With good feedback from all the instructors we asked their students who would be interested in participating in the beta. 

5 students accepted and the future of the product looks promising.