Event management for amateur football teams

We've tried to create an experience that would reduce the time scheduling football events for coaches so they could focus on football instead of scheduling.

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We listed the critical challenges for the coaches. All the coaches we interviewed complained about the complexity of using multiple third-party apps to schedule a training session.

Discovery phase

We surveyed 136 coaches in Switzerland, got some answers and invite them to in-depth interview. We collected keypoints from the survey and interviews. That data taught us they need an efficient and user-friendly tool to streamline amateur football coaches' scheduling and management process. This tool should integrate with existing calendar and messaging apps then provide practical communication features to ensure smooth communication with the players.

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The Problem was the time and focus

My PM was an amateur football coach, he told us how they're dealing with scheduling and communicating with players. They were facing challenges such as coordinating schedules, collecting player availability, sharing changes with players, and managing potential conflicts. 100% of the coaches rated effective communication with players as essential. From 136 coaches, 55% of them were struggling with the organizing event by current method. 77% of coaches spend 3-6 hours per week.

Why?

We could help them to quickly complete their paperwork

4 hours per week is a considerable amount of time for a volunteer coach to spend on administrative tasks. This time could be better spent coaching and developing players.

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they could stop being repetitive

The functions of scheduling practices and matches, collecting player availability, and communicating changes are all repetitive and frustrating. With one platform they could stop being repetitive for hours.

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coaches could be more efficient

The current scheduling method and managing practices and matches could be more efficient. Coordinating schedules, collecting player availability, and communicating changes are often complex. This can lead to missed practices and games and can be a source of conflict between coaches and players.

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55% of the coaches are a considerable audience.

Based on our interviews with coaches, over 50% prefer using a single app to schedule practices and games instead of relying on several third-party apps.

We thought with Smartcoach, the coaches could save time, reduce frustration, and improve the efficiency of the scheduling and management process. As a result, they can focus on their job: coaching and developing players.

Smartcoach can also benefit players. They can log in and accept or decline event invitations, we want to make sure that players notify the coaches that they're attending or not.

So, a question for us…

How can we streamline scheduling and managing events for amateur football coaches across all levels of play so that it is more convenient, less time-consuming, and more efficient for them?

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App? Extension? Native or web?

We discussed what type of a product we should design & build to be simple instead of making much more complex then usual method. And, it was need to be done in 8-weeks. So, our finalist were an extension and a web-app, we decided to go with Web-app because it works on Desktop, tablet and mobile.

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Main features

Event creation flow

We want to make it as simple as we should. First, I told my PM that we should seperate the flow with steps. In that time that was a good idea but now I think I made a mistake and I believe there is room for improvment.

Player's Rsvp

Each player will be able to provide availability for every event so the coaches can know who's attending. (We discussed a lot of about this feature that should we add or not, then we decided to add because this is amateur football not every player shows up to every session and they have main job.)

Get directions to venue

One of the problems from Player's side, teams don't have a fixed place that means every practice can planned to differnt places. We believed with this feature make communication clear.