Improving user experience

[kolaf]

The purpose of this discussion is to brainstorm design ideas to improve the usability of the platform for the different kinds of users. Good ideas should be moved into separate issues where the discussions and refinement of the idea will continue. Issues created from this discussion are labelled spectator experience, pilot experience, or manager experience. Please review these issues before suggesting design improvements. The discussion posts will be updated with links to the issues created.

Below is a summary of the different type of users that use the airsports platform. The different user types have quite different needs. Some of these needs are already satisfactorily covered by the platform, but several of the needs are not well met.

For the airsports platform we have three types of users:

• Spectators
• Competition organizers
  • Self managed
  • Fully managed
• Pilots
  • Self managed
  • Fully managed

Spectators

For the spectator it is important to find the contests and navigation tasks they are interested in. Once a specific navigation task is found it is important that the live tracking is engaging and easy to understand. The scoring must be clear. It must be easy to understand why a penalty is applied, and the page should build suspense about what will happen next.

Competition managers

A competition manager is anyone with competition privileges in the platform. They can create routes using the route editor, upload their own background maps, create contests and navigation tasks, and manage the teams and contestants within these. We differentiate between two types of contest management, self managed or fully managed.

A self managed competition typically requires little intellection from the manager after a task has been created. It is up to the pilot to register themselves with the contest and schedule a flight in the task. Successful task registration will trigger generation of a flight order that contains everything the pilot needs to complete the flight successfully.

A fully managed competition does not allow the pilot to do any management or planning over their own. It is up to the competition manager to create each contestant with the selected tracking and starting times and prepare the required navigation material.

Self managed

Contest and task creation for self managed competitions and fully managed competitions have the same requirements. Contests and tasks should be easy to create with an appropriate graphical profile (for sponsorships). The route editor must be easy to use, and it should be quite intuitive which features to create to support different task types. Creating a navigation task of any type should be straightforward. It should only be possible to select routes that are appropriate for that task type. All relevant scoring parameters should be clearly accessible and changeable by the manager.

A self managed task typically requires the air sports app for ease integration when tracking the user.

Fully managed

A fully managed competition has the additional tasks of creating and organizing contestants and making sure that receive the correct navigation tools and maps. There are two stages to competition planning. The initial planning is performed when all contestants are registered, typically sometime before the start of the task. The second stage is the chaos right before tasks start where there are changes to teams, new contestants, the wind has changed, and so on. Both these scenarios must be easily supported by the platform.

Fully managed tasks often use external trackers instead of the air sports app. The configuration of these trackers must be easy, and it should be clear which contestant should have which tracker to avoid any confusion.

Flight cleanup

It happens that there are issues with the tracking or configuration of a contestant. It must be possible to clean this up after the fact, and the tools available to do this should be obvious. The current solutions are too upload a GPX file for an existing contestant, recalculate the track for an existing contestant, or simply deleting the contestant and creating again with the correct tracking information. These solutions are not apparent and should be improved.

Pilots

The pilots should ideally not be aware of the platform when flying. They either get handed a preconfigured tracker or simply start tracking in the air sports app before the flight. No other intervention should be necessary, but when using the app it could be useful with some feedback that everything is working as expected.

An example issue to improve the pilot experience is #45. Feel free to contribute to the discussion of that issue.

After a flight a polite acts as a spectator in that they want to see the tracking map and review the flights. They might have a higher requirement of details over the flight then the average spectator.

Self managed

Self managed pilots must be able to quickly find the relevant contest and navigation task, schedule a flight, and receive the navigation tools. This must be supported from cellphones with small screens.

Fully managed

A fully managed part it should simply receive the tracker and go flying. When the task is made public it should be easy for the pilot to find it and review the flight.