Athlete Medical App RFP

The challenge

As part of our company mission of becoming the operating system for sport, myself, another senior designer, and a product manager were given the task of designing an app to form Kitman’s response to a request for proposal from a potential league client. The league wanted an app to allow their athletes and retired athlete to access and share their medical records. We were given three weeks to create this app design from scratch, with input from engineering, marketing, and sales as well as weekly check ins with leadership before it was submitted. Being the lead on Performance Medicine I was given the task of designing the medical area of this app as well as the home page and input on the branding and visual design style.

What is this app trying to solve?

Certain sporting leagues have player’s associations which mandate that the players receive access to all their medical records collected while playing. This can be a massive amount of data as clubs are legally required to keep detailed notes and records on all injuries, illnesses, treatments, etc. Previously, retired players would be given large PDFs or print outs of their entire medical history from a club once they left, this could be boxes of paper making it quite difficult to keep on track of or find specific injury details. One player This app looked to simplify the sharing of their medical data as well as make it easier for players to find details of specific injuries.

Why is this so vital for current players?

More players are looking for second opinions on their injuries from different specialists who may offer an alternate prognosis or treatment plan. In order to get their medical records to send for a second opinion they have to ask their club for a print out of this information. This print out may not always include their full history for that body part and some information may be left out. In addition, players can’t see their injury details, notes, and rehab plans to check in on their progress, while some players may not want that detail, many younger players are taking a more hands on approach with their care and want to keep track of this information.

Why is this so vital for former players?

During this project we had the chance to hear from a former NFL player who told us his medical records from his time playing are in boxes in his garage. The injuries he suffered however are still causing him problems so when a new issue occurs with a part of his body he’s either trying to remember what happened throughout his 10+ year career or he’s having to search through those boxes to find the full history of that body part to then give to his doctor or physiotherapist.

Our main issues

How do we structure that large an amount of information?

Depending on the sport, a career can stretch from a few years to almost 20, this means the amount of medical data collected can we quite large. Finding specific details in that large a dataset can we quite tricky so we knew we needed to focus on simplifying this flow. We looked at a number of other apps which deal with large amount of data such as Apple Photos, Google Photos, Google Drive, and Dropbox. In addition, we looked at a number of apps which have a focus on body area such as WebMD and a workout app called Fitbod. Taking inspiration from some of these apps we designed a couple of different options to present to leadership before taking the best bits of those designs and creating the final design with filtering layers for season, team, and body part as well as a full chronological timeline.

Moving to consumer focused design

As most of the apps within Kitman Labs were designed for the practitioners rather than the players their style was more B2B focused. For this RFP however, the league had asked for a more consumer focused design that better reflected their brand and would be engaging for the athletes. While we looked at their brand and the redesign it had gone through we wanted this app to work for all leagues and sports so we took the majority of our inspiration from consumer facing sports brands should as Nike, Adidas and Bleacher Report. Aspects of these brands that we found appealing were bold fonts, white backgrounds, dark text, tabs, and colourful images. The bolder typeface and dark text also resonated with the brand overhaul Kitman had just undergone so we felt aligning our consumer focused app and our external brand in this way would unify the product and the brand.

Result

Within the three weeks we were able to design an app with an engaging home page, full career medical details, and an ability to pick and choose what to share to other practitioners. Additional features such as concussion results, messaging, and a calendar were designed to show the difference between having Kitman Labs as the full EMR provider or having this app integrate with a third party. Our mockups were then added to four videos, each explaining a different section, and these were submitted as part of the RFP process.