El Potential

Project description

How can we design an intuitive app that gives a clear, accessible overview of the five wellbeing pillars by identifying essential metrics, understanding user needs and skill levels, tailoring data per role, and visualizing information without causing confusion or overload?

Context

Designing a dashboard for equestrian needs, in which 3 different apps' data is combined.

Results

An interactive Figma prototype and answers to the following research questions:

“How can we design an intuitive app that gives a clear, accessible overview of the five wellbeing pillars by identifying essential metrics, understanding user needs and skill levels, tailoring data per role, and visualizing information without causing confusion or overload?”

An intuitive app for monitoring the five wellbeing pillars can be achieved by designing primarily around the needs of riders and trainers, while ensuring the same data remains meaningful for other stakeholders through aggregation and clarity. Riders and trainers are the primary users, as they interact with the dashboard daily and make time-critical decisions that directly affect horse welfare and performance. Designing for their needs establishes a strong usability baseline that can be extended to veterinarians, managers, owners, and federations.

Clarity starts with identifying the most essential information for each pillar. By focusing on current status, recent changes, and signals that require action, the dashboard translates complex and fragmented data into understandable insights. Presenting this information through recognizable trends and clear status indicators, rather than raw metrics, enables users to quickly assess whether intervention is needed.

“Who is our target audience?”
Riders and trainers are the primary target audience due to their frequent interaction with data and direct responsibility for horse wellbeing. Other roles use the data less frequently and at a more abstract level, making aggregated views sufficient for their needs.

“What info matters most for each of the five pillars?”
Each pillar emphasizes actionable insights: Training focuses on workload and progression, Biomechanics on movement quality and symmetry, Nutrition on intake balance and consistency, Environment on stable conditions and external factors, and Mental State on an aggregated score derived from the other pillars.

“Which are the user groups? What do they all need individually?”
Five user groups were identified: riders/trainers, veterinarians/physios, managers/coaches, owners, and federations. Their needs range from daily, detailed insights to periodic, high-level overviews, requiring flexible data presentation without system fragmentation.

“What technical skills do the users have, or lack thereof?”
Most users have strong domain expertise but limited technical and data-analysis skills. Complex graphs, abstract metrics, and hidden interactions increase misinterpretation, reinforcing the need for explicit labeling, familiar patterns, and low cognitive effort.

“How can we tailor the data for riders/trainers while still being usable for other roles?”
This can be achieved through a single dashboard structure with role-based granularity, configurable widgets, and progressive disclosure. Riders and trainers receive detailed, daily insights, while other users access summarized and contextualized views.

“What causes confusion, mistakes, or miscommunication?”
Unclear terminology, insufficient visual hierarchy, hidden navigation, and excessive averaging were the main sources of confusion, often leading to incorrect conclusions.

“How can we show data without overwhelming users?”
By prioritizing overview before detail, using clear visual hierarchy, concise indicators, and optional deeper exploration, the dashboard supports fast understanding without cognitive overload.

Overall, this project demonstrates that a complex equestrian ecosystem can be translated into a clear, actionable dashboard through research-driven prioritization, user-centered simplification, and structured visualization, forming a strong foundation for future development in professional equestrian practice.

About the project group

We are a diverse group of students who were motivated by Caroliens enthusiastic speech about the need for an interactive dashboard. This project spanned eight week during which we applied the design thinking method.

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