We designed a phone application for people to use when attending recreation centres. The app enables users manage their classes and equipment rentals, as well as view how busy the gym facilities are. The benefit of this app over existing technologies is that it concentrates services provided by the recreation centre all in one place. For example, to register for exercise classes at the University of Calgary, one would have to phone or email the instructor. With our app, users can view and register in classes all within the app.
Recreation centres are split between many different mediums to provide information. For instance, to learn about classes, a lot of people prefer looking through a class brochure. To register, they would phone or show up in person. To rent equipment, people can read price listings online, but then have to phone or show up in person to rent the equipment. Thankfully, this is changing in current times; many recreation centres are putting their information online. However, it isn’t all there yet. For instance, to register in a exercise class at the University of Calgary, people can view class information online - but must phone in/email to register. The goal of our recreation centre app is to bring all these different interactions into one app. Ideally, all you would need, and prefer, is to use the app to handle all activities you do at the recreation centre. For our project, we designed a phone application that aims to do just this.
Our ultimate goal was to design an phone application that would manage everything to do with attending a recreation centre. Based on our user research, we prioritized three main tasks that we focused our design on. These features were later implemented in our prototype.
- The ability to view how busy each faculty at the recreation centre is.
- The ability to register/view/unregister from classes.
- The ability to rent/view currently rented equipment.
Our efforts were centred around designing an interface that accomplished these three tasks. We also had to keep the interface simple to remain accessible to as many users as possible.
We performed 3 different research methods.
- Rapid Ethnography
At the University of Calgary, we interviewed several students and staff members at the recreation centre. We asked them several deep questions on what mattered to them at the recreation centre.
- Survey
To get input from more people, we constructed an online survey about recreation centres. The survey was designed to cover a broad range of simple questions regarding individuals and their usage of recreation centers.
- Secondary Research
We collected reviews about recreation centres in Calgary from online forums and comment boards. Using these reviews, we boiled down some common user wants/needs.
For additional details, please check our P1.
From our research, we found several useful insights. A lot of people complained that the gym was very busy. They wanted to know how busy the Rec Centre was before they showed up. We also discovered a large disparity in the characteristics of our users. Several people said they did everything, including classes, at the recreation centre. However, others only knew the centre offered classes, but never signed up for one. People generally expressed some interest in being able to rent items for easy pickup. From the staff’s perspective, they were quite happy with their current administrative computer system, and felt it had no significant problems.
There many views in our design that can be justified. In the following paragraphs, we will summarize each one them and explain some reasons why the interface is the way it is.
For more detailed information on this topic, refer back to P2 and P3.
Firstly, we will cover the main menu. We chose the tiled main menu design for several reasons. Tiles for each of the faculties would help new users find related information rather easily, and would encourage positive transfer from current recreation centre websites. The ultimate goal of this is that it is easier for users to discern faculties from each other. Our alternative designs for the main menu were very complicated. While they did offer more functionality, we ruled that it would be too overwhelming for new users.
We added the MyZone and Rentals pages to separate out the user's current account, and the rentals functionality. The main idea behind these views is that they would allow them to view everything to do with their account in one place.
In MyZone, users can view their membership, classes and remove classes they’ve previously registered in. This is the alternative from having each of these details in separate pages. By having it all in one place, it is more convenient to the user, and helps get rid of unnecessary several pages the user would have to navigate through to do the same tasks.
From our heuristic evaluation, we came to the conclusion the current Rentals Page is quite problematic. For now, we will simply explain our intentions behind the original design. On the Rentals Page, we used plus “+” and minus “-” signs on the buttons to make it more intuitive to the users to quickly rent items. This was an alternative to using a text box, or separating a “Rent” and “Return” button. We also tracked the user's rental history, to allow them to remember what they have rented. The idea behind this was it would allow users to remember what to return. In the future, it would be better to have a “Currently Rented” list, and to provide better feedback when renting items.
The Faculty Page contains information related to the individual faculties at the recreation centre. Users can see how busy the faculty is, and what classes are offered by the faculty. We went with the list of lists design on this page because it is extensible. Our goal was to provide the user with lots of information, but to cut back on it to not make it confusing. The idea behind providing a class schedule was to bring classes to the forefront, because many people we interviewed didn’t know the recreation centred offered classes, and if they did - which ones were offered. By making classes more visible, it would encourage users to try them out. Therefore, they would hopefully have a higher level of satisfaction at the recreation centre.
The heuristic evaluation that we conducted exposed many weaknesses in our interface. Many of these weaknesses had a severity rating of only minor. However there were also a few major violations which we regarded a major usability issue. Aspects which we considered were minor violations consisted of; not having any help documentation, having views which were cluttered with too much information and using some methods which the user is not familiar with. A more catastrophic violation was the violation of not having any visibility of system status when tasked with choosing items to rent. This is a major violation because it contradicts one of the major principles of a good user interface. The user needs to feel satisfaction.
The next iteration of our design would not only aim to correct all the violations that we discovered. We would also endeavor to add some more functionality. We have came up with some solutions regarding the heuristic violations. For the rentals page, there was too much information being displayed. We would aim to spread that information into two separate views. The reason for this is that we want to keep the more important information on the same view, and we would move the secondary information in a view so the user would have to go one view deeper to view it. We want information that is the most important for the task to be easier to access. The information that is not directly related to completing a task would have to be viewed by going on view deeper in the interface. Furthermore a issue that would be addressed in the next iteration is the lack of feedback when renting an item. Currently when a user wants to rent an item they simply press on the 'plus' button in the rentals view. However there is no feedback to let the user know their request was registered. The only way to view the current rentals is to press a button which opens another view that contains this information. This interaction feels clunky and undesirable, we want to the user to be able to see immediately the result of their actions. To correct this we would start by removing the additional button to view the current rentals, and place this information on the same view where the user will request a rental, that way the user can see all the important information in the same view and they don't have to dig deeper into the interface.
Some of the functionality we would like to implement regarding the system has to do with providing functionality for more aspects of the recreation center. Namely, we would like to have more current events/news information. The user would be alerted with any events going on in the recreation center with a notification. For example if the swimming pool is being shut down temporarily, the user would be given this information in the form of a scrolling text banner. In addition, we would like to offer similar functionality for other facilities. Such as family activities, day-care services and information sessions. We would want to bring all this information together such that the user does not have to go through several different mediums to get the information they want. To do this, we would create a different home view where the user could chose to go into the sports related views. Or, the use could go into another view which would allow users to register their kids in daycare, or register for a non-sports related class at the recreation centre.
In conclusion, we’ve produced a design for a recreation centre app that brings information all into one place. People attending the recreation centre can manage their classes, equipment rentals, and view how busy the faculty is from within the app. Thanks to the design process, we have identified shortcomings of several areas of the interface. Fixing these will allow us surely to move closer to performing more usability studies. Eventually, this will allow us to move ahead and implement a final system for people to enjoy.