Mask Adherence in
High School Sports
How might we design a mask that entices high school athletes to take precaution on and off the sidelines in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19?
Skills Used
Initial Research
To start, each team completed initial research on mask adherence in order to identify an opportunity area. My team chose to focus on high school sports. To the right, our framework was used to identify the big stakeholders within this realm. Ultimately, we chose to focus on the athletes themselves.
Through conducting virtual interviews with two baseball players, a hockey player, and a football player, we gained a multitude of insights that guided us in developing our player journey map. The map highlights key tensions in the journey such as remembering to pack a mask, deciding how early to arrive to the public setting, and navigating team interactions.
User Feedback
Having understood the tensions and insights surrounding high school athlete mask usage, we focused on three main areas when moving into prototyping. Our first consideration was, “How might we leverage health metrics and player stats to allow players to understand how wearing a mask impacts their performance?” We heard from our participants that they thought that wearing masks negatively affects their athletic performance. Our idea here was if we could show the athletes that their statistics from playing with and without a mask were the same, or could even improve their stats with a performance enhancing mask, that they would be more likely to wear it. I worked on developing a very simple to understand user interface that would be used during our second round of research to evoke responses.
Additionally, we developed sketches of our prototypes with different designs that would help answer our research questions. We wondered, “How might we create a simple and convenient mask for use in sports during play?” We also had users complete ranking and sorting activities over google slides in order to help us understand the design and functional requirements that interested these athletes.
In this second round, we spoke to an additional football and baseball player, as well as an athletic trainer. I developed a Venn diagram framework to understand the likes and dislikes of each person and where there is overlap between groups. Our prototypes led us to two key ideas. One, desired mask features are highly dependent on the sport, and two our athletes universally prefer masks with out ear loops.
Final Design Considerations
After synthesizing our final round of research and having developed 4 major insights, we believe that our insight surrounding creating sport-specific masks for athletes has the most design energy and would be our area of focus if we were to take the project further. Especially during our second round of design research, we heard varying mask priorities from the different athletes. For example, baseball players may like the longer gaiter for SPF protection for their necks, while football players would prefer the half gaiter we created to get rid of the unnecessary fabric on their necks that makes them sweat more. The other three topics - Comfort, Materials, and Secure - are what we believe need to be focused on when creating these sport-specific masks.
Potential Impact and Future Goals
With the goal of this project being to focus on the design research components, I gained valuable knowledge in how to interview individuals and synthesize research in order to find patterns and insights. My team identified areas of growth for future projects being, talking to a wider range of users in the initial phases of the project, creating activities that better probe a users responses, and working on effectively communicating designs in a virtual environment.