Formative usability assessment of a digital dashboard designed in a British Basketball League club

Although current athlete performance monitoring system designs undertaken within sports engineering and technology research have a strong focus on achieving functionality requirements, considerations on usability evaluation and testing during the design process are limited. Conventional design research highlights the importance of factoring usability at the heart of performance monitoring system designs like human-computer interfaces. Consequently, based on a user-centred approach, this research aimed to design a digital dashboard to optimise a scouting information flow within a professional basketball club and improve usability issues in the design by executing formative usability assessment approaches. Thematic analysis conducted on the data obtained from an initial semi-structured interview with the Head Coach of the club clarified dashboard functionality and design requirements, importance of the scouting process and information on potential system users. Thereafter, guided by the Build-Measure-Learn cycle in The Lean Startup framework, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) of the dashboard were designed and 25 usability issues in the initial MVP were identified from heuristic evaluations conducted with three usability experts. Following system redesign, task-based think aloud usability testing sessions conducted with five coaches (i.e. users) at the club unravelled further nine usability issues in the dashboard, which were resolved by systematically pivoting to new MVPs during the iterative design process. Overall, this paper outlines a systematic approach to conducting formative usability assessment of sports technologies and highlights the importance of resolving specific usability issues present in technological systems like dashboards designed by practitioners embedded in applied sport environments.