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Adding an injury to a student takes the user to this page, where he or she adds the basic information needed to update the athlete's profile page. We originally had the user enter a custom date, which caused formatting problems once we began implementation. We changed the date field to three separate input boxes for day, month, and year. Unfortunately, this added another level of confusion because users were unaware if January was 1 or 0.

Implementation

Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.

We used Ruby on Rails with Twitter Bootstrap as the main components of our implementation.

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Athletes belong to one trainer - We modeled the system to have each athlete belong to one trainer. MIT trainers say that each athlete works with a single trainer, but this limited other trainers from editing the workouts. Although it reduced the flexibility of the system, it provided a level of safety that only allowed the specified trainer to edit the workouts.

Two Way Notes Communication  - Both an athlete and a trainer could add notes to the athlete's log. Originally, we built the system to only allow the trainer to store notes about the athlete. However, allowing both groups to write notes back and forth offered a more interactive communication between the student and trainer. We also added colors to the notes. We intentionally did not specify what the colors represent, giving the trainer the freedom to use the colors as they pleased.

Reordering of exercises - In our original decision, we wanted to add the ability to reorder exercises within a workout. However, implementations problems prevented us from being able to include this feature. (The feature actually worked, but it broke the drag and drop functionality. We felt the drag and drop functionality was more important to the overall usability for the trainer).

Evaluation

Users:

We conducted our user test with two MIT athletic trainers and one MIT student who has had a lot of encounters with athletic trainers. Since the site is a tool for athletic trainers, the athletic trainer is the core of our target population. We also needed one MIT student because they were the target user for the athlete side of Easy Trainer.

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