UllSail - Mobile App for Training

UllSail is an app that was developed for a university course. Its main purpose was to bring users closer to sailing. By conducting interviews and questionnaires with both athletes and coaches we were able to detect difficulties when it comes to their training sessions. Taking notes and being observant, proves to be rather cumbersome when more than 10 boats and athletes are moving around during their training, so we decided to tackle this issue and many more, with a web app.

Depending on the type of user that was associated with sailing, different functionalities emerged.

Coaches could record training sessions by tracking their athlete's boats, take notes and replay them after their session and discuss potential errors and improvements. Tracking is achieved by implementing LoRaWAN and adding the necessary electronics on board with proper waterproof casings.

Athletes can keep track of various achievements and performance scores, their boats and create memories through photos. This helped create a sense of community and camaraderie.

Guests had the ability to spectate training sessions by using specific IDs, to ensure anonymity.

We developed a simple demo of our app to prove the validity of the methods used and a more complex interactive mockup for user testing. The methods used in user testing were with Think-Aloud protocol. By giving users specific tasks to achieve, we kept track of the time they needed to complete them, as the errors they made along the way. After completing all tasks, they filled an SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaire for some more metrics and a SEQ (Single Ease Questionnaire). The testing went very well, with many insights as to how to improve the design of our app to ensure better conversion times and success rates.