Overview

Pitbox is a cloud-based, single platform service for capturing, storing, analysing and solving the science behind motor racing. Pitbox improves team efficiency through technology, helping teams achieve optimal performance with lightning fast communication.

I was involved in the conceptual design and research phase of  PITBOX — the objective of PITBOX was to capture motorsports data in a structured manner to provide better analysis which would mean building drivers' confidence & reducing the cost of motorsport for drivers. I worked on this project whilst completing my internship at Our Very Own. This was a  challenging project, it had highs and lows. Whilst I was being mentored by Senior Designers throughout the project there were many stages within the design process that I undertook and completed myself.

Problem Statement

“As a race driver who is trying to improve my performance, I need to capture my track session data clearly so that my race engineers are able to analyse them. I am experiencing issues trying to capture them on paper during each session as I am inconsistent in the way I am documenting my notes.”

Key Deliverables

• Objectives

• A problem statement

• Screen flows

• Blueprints

• Scenarios & user flows  

• Proto-personas

• Findings & quotes 

• Next steps  

Research process

Understanding Stakeholder Needs

Running a stakeholder workshop provided the opportunity to understand the car racing industry in more detail and understand the stakeholder’s needs for the first phase MVP. 

In this case the stakeholders had created proto-personas of the intended users, we went through these personas in detail in order for me to gain an understanding of their roles within the industry and how they would be using the app.  

User Interviews

To gain a deeper understanding of the user’s motivations, goals, concerns and emotions I organised to interview race car drivers from the industry.  I was responsible for crafting the interview questions and organising and conducting the interviews. I asked questions relating to their everyday life, their roles and responsibilities in the industry, how often they use technology in day to day life, what the main pain points are in the process currently and what their ideal app would look like (blue sky activity). The interview process debunked many of the assumptions that had been made.

Journey Mapping

I used many different methods to synthesise the findings from the interview process. I started off by mapping out the drivers journey on a race weekend. This enabled me to clearly identify the drivers tasks, actions, emotional experience and pain points which then lead to being able to identify opportunities and insights.

Affinity Mapping

Because there were so many touch points in the drivers journey I found the journey mapping overwhelming and it was no longer beneficial to my process. Instead, I collated all the post-it notes I wrote during the interviews and began placing them in themes that slowly started to emerge.

Validating proto personas

After the interview and synthesis process I was able to validate the personas created that had initially been created by the client. The personas were extracted from quantitive and qualitative data.

Scenarios and user flows

Scenarios and user flows were created to discover the pain points in the current user flow & step up opportunities with the new proposed flow.

Co-design workshop with stakeholders

We ran a collaborative workshop with the stakeholders in order for them to have an opportunity to co design the flows for the MVP. I really enjoyed this way of working, since then I have endeavoured to hold client co-design sessions in all of my projects.

Next steps

The recommended next steps to the client if I had of been on this project end to end were to: 

• Usability test prototype to validate features

• Iterate on the designs accordingly

• Validate proto personas with the appropriate sample size of 5-8 user participants

Key Learnings

Set clear parameters with the client

I felt out of my depth because I made more work for myself than was needed by the brief. I let the client talk me into creating work that wasn’t set out in the scope, I accepted because of my desire to contribute, but that led to feeling overwhelmed.

Poor communication leads to inefficiency

I struggled with post-rationalisation in this project- mainly because I was unclear about my role. The learning from this is to seek clarity around my role and responsibilities as early as possible as without that clarity, inefficiency starts to creep in.   

Learning the value of asking for help when overwhelmed

When I become stressed other good qualities, like my attentiveness and communication skills suffer. I recognise there are always going to projects that are more stressful than others what I have to learn is to silo the stress to that particular project and not let that seep into other projects.