Effective recording of sports results with the new CHECK`D app.
Every year, the Düsseldorf Sports Office tests all children at Düsseldorf schools from first to tenth grade for their motor skills and mobility - with pen and paper.
Development of a web app for recording sports tests
During the test, the sports office staff test one class at a time. Especially with younger classes, there are always challenges in organising and structuring the test. Due to the different gyms, the order of the tests must always be dynamic.
1. The examiner must be able to gather all the information of pupils on site.
2. During and after the exercises, the results had to be completed very quickly, without much time for corrections.
3. A lot of time is needed to explain the task several times during the test.
The app had to allow the examiners to quickly record all the children's data on very small tablets, as well as adapt existing data on site.
Given the different technical skills of the examiners, the design was as minimal as possible and only contained well known ‘standard functions’.
All input fields have been optimised for use on tablets. Large clickable areas and icons allow testers to quickly select the next area by touch. Increased text sizes makes reading more easily.
During the tests, however, it got quite obvious, that the elements themselves were to big and needed a redesign. Missing features were added in during the rework.
The examiners preferred to use the ‘next button’ directly on the tablet's keyboard to quickly move to the next field instead of manually tabbing to the next field.
Based on this observation, however, i suggested completely bypassing the ‘next button’ by automatically activating the next input field after each technically correct entry. This considerably increased the speed of the subsequent tests.
At every presentation, the educational animations put a smile on the faces of all the decision makers and were one of their favourite ideas. ‘This will save so much time and the kids will love it’.
Surprisingly, it turns out that you shouldn't put your digital tools in the hands of primary school children and expect everything to go well... Also the trained examiners were far more effective at explaining the exercises than any animation. That's why we removed them to create more space for more relevant information.
Previously, the test, parental consent form and medical information were only processed using lists and forms on paper and Excel and manually transferred to a CMS. Those days are now over, as all results flow directly into the Sportamt database.
The app is now in its second testing phase and will be used by other nearby cities soon.
The app is just a small part of a larger project to digitalise the world of sport in Düsseldorf and was particularly instructive for me.
