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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Teach ADAMS about user centric design

Lo and Behold! 2 athletes have been a bit careless about their whereabouts and got suspended for a year by the Flemish anti-doping agency. Said athletes defend themselves by saying the app they have to use is too complicated, Internet is not available everywhere and they can't log in when they've forgotten their passwords. Be that as it is, one example of 'too difficult' kept going around in my mind: Xavier Malisse explained that he has to indicate his 'Daily Residence' when he is e.g. trainig for a couple of weeks on the other side of the world. His training venue cannot be his Daily Residence. He then doesn't know what to fill in, leaves it blank, gets an error and a faulty whereabouts.

So I went looking for this application and found a description of Adams on the Web.

Djeezes! If they would have considered getting the advise of a usability expert instead of creating an application that is based on the rules and the data needed, the end-result would have been something an athlete can use. Not something based on rules like:

As mentioned in the Location Descriptors section, athletes have to create location
descriptors for “Mailing Address”, “Daily Residence”, “Training” and “Competition”.
Yet, some might not be applicable.
“Daily Residence”: Every day of the quarter must have a “Daily Residence” entry.
As the “daily residence” appears in orange in the calendar, each day of the
calendar must have one orange entry.
This information can’t be provided by the team manager either


I for one don't know WTF this means ...

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