Swing Catalyst is a very advanced video analysis tool for Golf and Baseball, which integrates with the patented sensor plates, Balance Plate and 3D Motion Plate, which perfectly syncs sensor data with the video. In addition, it integrates with top of the line sports technology from other vendors.
Swing Catalyst is known to be the most user-friendly and powerful suite on the market. It’s used by many of the Top 100 coaches in the world.
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The Problem
What Swing Catalyst is most praised for is being so easy to use, despite having very advanced features and integrating with an ever-growing number of hardware systems.
Users are constantly requesting new features to be added to the product and it becomes increasingly important to make the right choices for the UX design, so users intuitively know how to use these new features and at the same time avoid the existing experience becoming to complex.
The Eco-System
Swing Catalyst consists of a range of products that make a whole suite of tools.
- Desktop software: The main tool, a video analysis system that integrates and synchronizes video with hardware data and provides the necessary tools for full analysis of a golf swing or baseball swing/pitch. Built-in Lesson tool to make video lessons available over for the athlete.
- Online: Storage and facilitation of communication between an instructor/coach and their athlete(s), all lessons are sent and stored here.
- App: For recording and analysis on the move, also integrated directly with the Online cloud. Athletes can record themselves here and send to their instructor/coach for analysis and receive lessons back without having to go into a facility.
- Learning Center/Certification: A platform on the website where known instructors and our Research Director posts articles and videos on how to improve your swing technique. For Golf, we also have certification courses that give you an understanding of how to use the data from the sensor plates for analysis. This certification gives you credit in the PGA system.
The Job
I’m responsible for everything design in the product line. A day at the office can consist of anything from researching, exploring concepts and prototyping new features to talking with users about existing troubles or wishes to design new UI elements in detail and keep the external factors (emails, websites, etc) in line with the overall experience.
You could say I’m somewhat of a design unicorn, but my main focus is on exploring what a new feature actually is and who it is for, decide how it should work and look for the user and keep the software the way it is known for — easy to use.
Overview of tasks:
- UX Design
- Product Strategy
- Research
- Prototyping
- UI Design
- Front-End Development
- User research
The Process
Overall process
I’m part of the development team at Initial Force, we work in 2 weeks sprints and work based on a Development Plan that’s made for the year ahead. We set goals for each sprint and this also defines how I approach work, in general, I have 1-2 sprints to finish a general project, depending on the scale. For large scale projects, we have Epics that last over a number of sprints, with time allocated to this project each sprint.
We do reviews of this quarterly and update each planned release accordingly based on new information during that review. This is decided by the entire company and based on input from each team as well as an understanding of the state of the market and company strategy (which can change over time).
During the times in between, we keep in touch with users and gather their requests for features and general thoughts, as well as pinpoint parts of our products that we during the overall analysis see as weak-points in the user experience.
Project process
- Research
We start off every project with research on what we are adding/changing in the product. I gather an understanding of what problem we’re trying to solve and who we’re solving it for. In this phase, we keep in touch with relevant users or use our personas, which are divided into three different groups of users (athlete, instructor/coach and power users – who can be both the aforementioned, but with a much higher technical understanding). - Exploration of concepts
We start exploring different approaches to the problem we’re trying to solve. In this phase, we often wireframe different approaches and test these. - Prototyping
We start prototyping, which is usually made interactively (with Invision Studio) to get a better feel for how it would work in the product once it’s developed. This goes through a number of testing rounds, where feedback is gathered, the prototype is iterated based on the feedback and then tested again. - Final prototype
Once the previous steps are done, we make a final interactive prototype which is then handed off to the developer who is assigned to the task.
All the documentation from the entire process is available on our internal document center (we use Confluence), but usually design
Design work is also completed quite ahead of development time, which gives us enough time to iterate and take into account new additions or technical challenges related to the project. This way we are well prepared for the development of a project and problems don’t arise while it’s being built.