Holdlederen

Introduction

This project is about designing and constructing a desktop application that would serve as a help for organising a football team.

The project’s purpose is to develop a fully functional prototype based on requirements specified by the project group.

It is our assumption that we can develop a system that will have a practical application for the people who participated in the requirement gathering process and potentially others.

Semester group project (2018, 4th semester of the bachelor, Interaction Design at Aalborg University)

Team: Andreas Winkel Sigsgaard, Anders Høgh Hansen, Emil Kongsgaard Guldager, Helena Buch Petersen, Lasse Stausgaard Jensen and Tummas Jóhan Sigvardsen.

MOTIVATION

We have chosen to focus on developing a system that will assist football coaches in various administrative tasks, such as storing player information, scheduling of training programs and preparing a line-up with accompanying tactics ahead of matches. We want to make a system that can be used by real coaches for real tasks.

We chose to work with football coaches, specifically the administrative work of a football coach, as we found the case interesting and challenging.

Users

We chose to include three coaches in the process. This was done with the intent of building an application that could appeal to a broader audience of coaches, and not just a specific football team and coach

Overall process

To help create an overview of the process and to ensure everyone in the group had the same idea of it, we drafted up the overall process for developing the system.

data and requirements

Before starting the development of the system, we gathered relevant data, using semi-structured interviews and looking at what functionality existing solutions provided. Based on these, we established a list of functional and non-functional requirements, which were ranked using the MoSCoW method. We kept evaluating on these as the process proceeded.

Design phase

After having established relevant requirements from our contact persons, the process of embedding these requirements into a user-friendly and intuitive design followed.

To generate the initial design concepts, we ideated individually by creating lo-fi sketches of possible designs that would address one or more of the requirements.

After the first session of individual sketching, we grouped all sketches based on their associated requirement before presenting each idea, giving feedback and discussing the different elements of the sketches. 

Lastly, we combined elements from multiple sketches into one coherent design, using the Heat Map method of marking either entire designs or specific elements that you want to take into the next round of iteration. 

After collectively deciding on the elements that would make up the initial design, we carried out a new iteration, which resulted in two rough wireframes of our design.

These wireframes were then recreated as hi-fi prototypes in Adobe XD. Both were evaluated by the football coaches and combined into one conceptual model.

When converting the Adobe XD prototype into a fully functional prototype, the wireframes were used as a visual guideline.

When it came to the final design of the application, there were some differences, when compared to the wireframes. Most of the changes were improvements of the wireframes, based on iterative refinement.

The second evaluation of the application yielded mainly positive feedback. Despite the positive outcome of the evaluations, we experienced a few recurring issues with the prototype in terms of stability and prevention of user errors.  

 

development

The structure of our application consisted of Java as the programming language, JavaFX as the application framework and SQLite as the database.

The structure of the system followed the architectural MVC pattern coupled with a task progress overview schema. This provided an efficient and structured approach, as each group member had a clear overview of who was doing what and what needed to be done.

Overall structure of the database
Many-to-many relationship between players and matches
code background
setOnDragDropped method performing relevant actions when a valid drop is detected
setOnDragDetected method allowing the dragging of single objects

the application

Holdlederen

We chose to name the application “Holdlederen”, as it is the title of a person connected to a team, whose job is to help the coach organise the team. Holdlederen is an application that aims to provide football coaches with a better overview of their team.

The application is based around six overall pages, which corresponds to the following menu options; Oversigt (Overview), Spillere (Players), Kalender (Calendar), Kampe (Matches), Træning (Training) and Statistik (Statistics). Each of the menu options contains subpages with relevant functionality. The sitemap provides a visual representation of the overall hierarchy of the application.

Overview of the different pages of Holdlederen

The overview page
Landing page for ‘Kalender’
Creating a match
The matches page
The training page, which shows a list of training programs
The players page
Pop up, when creating an activity
Creating a training session
The tactics page
The pop-up window for creating a training program
The pop-up for editing a player
Creating an miscellaneous event
The input results page
The statistics page

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