Project Overview
Challenge
The Basketball Doctors is co-owned by two physical therapists who provide virtual and in-person physical therapy (PT) to athletes. They wanted my team and I to research their current clients and propose a design that would increase their clientele.
Role
UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Team
Alex Hertz, Erik Nordquist
Duration
3-week design sprint (est. 180 hrs)
UX Methods
Heuristic Evaluation, C&C Analysis, User Interviews, Task Analysis, Affinity Mapping, Persona, Contextual Inquiry, Journey Map
Sketching, Wireframing , Usability Testing, Prototyping, Visual Design
Tools
Notion, Slack, Zoom, Miro, Pen & Paper, Figma
Design Process
Research
Research Plan
Research was imperative to this project because it helped my team and I to empathize with the users as well as help The Basketball Doctors accomplish their business goals. We wanted a complete understanding of the users’ challenges, fears, goals, and motivations during their physical therapy journey with The Basketball Doctors.
Recognizing Initial Assumptions
PT was a fast and easy step by step process
Virtual PT wasn’t as efficient or great as in-person PT
Research Methodologies
Secondary Research (Competitive Research + Heuristic Evaluation)
Primary Research (User Interviews + Contextual Inquiry)
Competitive Research
To see how The Basketball Doctors’ website competed against 7 direct competitors, we conducted a competitive analysis (see full report). The competitors were local, city-wide physical therapy websites with offices in or near the Los Angeles area. Completing the competitive analysis informed our understanding of how well The Basketball Doctors competed in the industry standard and feature services.
User Interviews
In order to learn more about our users, my team and I conducted 1-on-1 user interviews with The Basketball Doctors’ clients who worked with them virtually and/or in-person. We crafted our questions specifically to understand the users’ background, their PT experience with The Basketball Doctors, and their overall journey in PT (see full user interview script).
Example Questions
How did you choose The Basketball Doctors? What were the major factors in that decision?
What were your goals going into this process? Anxieties?
Think about the last session you had and walk me through it.
Task Analysis
We asked users to complete several tasks to test the validity of The Basketball Doctors’ current website and identify any drop off points on the website.
I want you to imagine that you’re looking for a physical therapist for your recent athletic injury. Walk me through your process using the site to evaluate if you’d like to hire the basketball doctors.
What would you do after you decide you want to work with the basketball doctors?
How might you book an appointment?
Did you find all the information you were looking for?
What did users think?
The Physical Therapists looked knowledgeable and reliable
Didn’t know how to book an appointment
Reluctant to choose the Physical Therapists if they were not basketball players
Contextual Inquiry
To further our user research, we believed that it would be helpful to watch a virtual PT session with The Basketball Doctors’ new client. We did a contextual inquiry of a 1-hr long zoom recording of the session and then synthesized our findings.
Research Analysis
Affinity Map
Given all the data we collected over our research period, the affinity map helped organize important points into user insights. Affinity mapping allowed us to find common themes and pain points between users, which we later used to inform our design decisions and identify user needs (see full affinity map). The 3 emerging major insights were Behavior, Mindset, and Environment.
User Persona
Let’s meet the Eager Athlete! We decided to use an illustration and a general name to promote inclusivity and decrease biases.
Experience Map
Based on the user research collected, I created an experience map to define the user’s journey to further identify their needs and pain points when getting matched with a physical therapist. This facilitated desired outcomes by pinpointing and minimizing negative client experiences as well as accomplishing business goals.
Ideate
Design Principles
Before we dove into ideating, we intentionally defined what exactly our users needed and wanted out of this platform. These design principles guided us to design specific features that aligned with the users’ goals, needs, wants, and expectations. Primarily, we wanted any potential clients of The Basketball Doctors to feel like they’re being taken care of and ease their existing anxieties. The ultimate goal was to empower The Eager Athlete to take charge of their PT experience.
Design Thinking (Sketches)
To foster collaboration and creativity, our team decided to do a group ideation and brainstorming session. During this time, we set a timer then agreed on a feature we wanted to sketch. Afterwards, we discussed which ideas we liked the most and incorporated them into our low fidelity wireframes.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Once we defined our design principles and sketched out our ideas, we collaborated in Figma to create low fidelity wireframes of our vision. Our low fidelity wireframes focused on 3 main steps of a new client for The Basketball Doctors - the first glance, the client’s onboarding, and the first meeting.
Style Guide
Our style guide was important to create and follow before we started to increase the fidelity, so we could keep the consistency and maximize efficiency. We wanted a balance between mindfulness & motivation. Our intention was to use different shades of blue to promote mindfulness for The Eager Athlete and red to motivate The Eager Athlete to train harder.
Testing
Usability Testing
We did one round of usability testing with six users where we asked them to imagine a scenario and walk through the prototype as if they’re a new PT client. We used the our low fidelity prototype to conduct usability testing, so users focused on the task rather than the visual design. Due to time constraints, we focused on three main issues to reiterate on which were the landing page, finding a PT, and the dashboard.
Final Prototype
High Fidelity Prototype
Next Steps
Build out the community pages - explore how the community page would function for users
A native mobile app - build a mobile app dedicated solely for managing and doing PT workout videos
Apple TV App - increase opportunities to easily do living room workouts
Lessons I learned
Approach new projects with an open mind. I came into this project with little to no knowledge of physical therapy (PT), I was genuinely surprised that I learned so much about the PT industry in a short 3 weeks. I immersed myself into the PT world to truly understand where the user came from, so I could make the best product to benefit ‘The Eager Athlete.’
User research will surprise you. I came into the project with surface level assumptions about PT patients and I put them aside during user interviews and research synthesis. This helped because I was surprised to discover the deeper psychological feelings of the athletes I interviewed.
Collaboration is essential. My team and I worked long hours from synthesizing research on a Miro board to finalizing details of the prototype. I learned that brainstorming or communicating ideas together can often lead to even greater outcomes!
