Mad Island Sports Swim Coaching iPad App

Mad Island Sports, a sports startup in Sydney, Australia, hired me to design their new swim coaching iPad app.

The startup’s co-founder was a swimming record holder and had experience in training swimming teams with teens between 12 and 18 years. He wanted the new app to unify the various steps and planning tools used by swimming coaches, to manage the team, structure the schedules, plan the training and track advances.

In various workshops we defined the user journeys for each task. We developed persona characteristics which helped us better understand the needs and expectations in each role or function. Then we created user flows for each area, from management of training time, training events and competitions, to managing the team, adding and removing members, tracking their personal development, up to the point of running an actual swimming lesson.

Swimming lessons are often competitively structured to prepare the swimmers for competitions. The swim coaching app allows the coach to assign them to lanes, track them in and adjust their data in realtime. It became quite complex, but through various user tests we improved the experience until the point where swimming coaches were saying they loved using the app.

The experience for the product design, including testing of prototypes, was concluded in 2015, but the app production was never completed, so the product hasn’t been released to the App Store.