Wheelchair Basketball Project

The project involved solving basic problems such as communication & feedback for the Indian Wheelchair Basketball Team through remote design.

Individual Project

Stages

Challenges & Problems

The Wheelchair Basketball Federation of India’s main priority is to promote Wheelchair Basketball in India. They have provided workshops in several states of India (Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu) where they reached out to 256 persons with physical impairments who participated willingly in the workshop period & learnt basics of wheelchair basketball.

Data Collection

After setting up semi structured interviews of 2 players & 2 coaches via telehphone/skype, there were issues found that affected the training & gameplay of these players.

Issues out of the interviews conducted

• No proper access to professional tools & ICT materials as compared to developed nations team’s resources.
• Language barrier (Because India is a mult-lingual country, the players are from different state & that creates lot of communication barriers while training & coaching)
• No proper access to sports equipped wheelchairs/monetary support.
• No proper courts & play areas for the wheelchair basketball players to practice.
• No proper feedback system.

These two issues (communication & feedback) were taken into account to solve & explore as the other issues were not in the scope of the project provided limited time period & limited financial/human resources.

Themes

As per the user research done, I had two issues focussed on solving.

Solution

Digital Prototype

A simple idea that focusses on two things

• Understanding basics of Wheelchair Basketball rules in more than one languages
• Provide a way to give feedbacks to the coaches & other players.

We went through several refinement of paper prototypes before refining the UI & creating an interactive prototype using Powerpoint

Physical Prototype

How to use it?

Before the start of a training session, these cut outs will be handed to the players The cutouts will contain two/four different languages on the sliders with certain rules, & important messages.

Once, the session is over, everyone will have a barcode which can be scanned & this will take them to a survey by Mentimeter on a screen, they will fill out the questionaire in their particular languages as well all the answers will be translated into three common languages of population.

The feedback will be in the form of quiz. The coach & players can discuss the results after the session is finished.

Conclusion

Based on this study, there is a lot of scope for this project to kick in real scenarios. The ideal situation will be to go & do a proper survey & interviews with those wheelchair basketball players in India and test these prototypes to make further iterations & improve the overall prototype.

The study showed data gathered and analyzed, as well as the various stages of prototypes that were made. Overall, this project was a learning experience & an exploration in the wild.

Learning outcomes: Remote Design, Remote Testing, Accessibility Frameworks