Software Systems for Analyzing Cycling Metrics

In the field of engineering, it is often difficult for those who do not have technical knowledge of engineering concepts to grasp complex products and metrics. To promote inclusivity of concepts and designs, it is important that complex topics are communicated effectively such that non-technical persons can understand.

Our sponsor AeroLab Tech ran into this problem, where although their product is an innovative breakthrough in aerodynamics measurement tools, their work could only be understood with prior knowledge of aerodynamics concepts. As their product was getting more traction, AeroLab Tech wanted to broaden the outreach of their product, and moving towards a user-centric approach was chosen. Our design addresses this issue by graphically displaying aerodynamic concepts with colors and images to convey their meaning. Further, our design offers an easy-to-understand format and explanations for these aerodynamic concepts.

We were faced with the challenge of designing an intuitive UI that displayed metrics in a manner where they are easily deciphered by pro athletes and novice cyclists alike. While planning our UI and web app’s design, we focussed on having a dynamic and cohesive design, catering design details to our sponsor’s requirements. We regularly met with our sponsor and were able to create unique elements, custom-tailored to each metric, while also keeping in mind their previous theme. All of our elements/dials have clear intent in their design color, theme, and positioning.

Given that AeroLab Tech wants to branch its customer base towards the hobbyist cyclist market, our design incorporates data visualizations with the use of various colored-based dials in order to best and simply convey AeroLab Tech’s technology.

We also provided a Web App to allow more in-depth analysis of the advanced metrics over the duration of the ride. 

The major design philosophy that we followed was to adhere to a modular design. This will allow future developers at Aerolab Tech to easily iterate upon our design and scale it up, such as adding new data to our summary screen using our pre-built GUI framework.

To validate our design solution, we created a validation testing suite to ensure that the expected outcomes occurred. We used UI Testing to ensure that elements are functioning according to the requirements specified. We continued to run and add more tests to our UI testing throughout the project to ensure that all sections of our project run as intended.

We also received approval from our sponsor on any design changes that we felt were appropriate. Further, we received advice from our TA and Academic Advisor on the best solutions we should use. Finally, we also received feedback from test users on changes that we can make to the UI to improve ease of use.

To ensure the feasibility of our project we used the Agile Scrum Methodology to structure the workflow of our development. We created 2-3 week sprints on Jira, with each sprint having a clear goal. Further, we met at least 2 times a week and performed stand-ups to ensure that everybody was on track with their progress. We performed a retrospective at the end of each sprint to reflect on the sprint, and decide if anything needs to be changed. These steps and structure helped us keep on top of our progress and ensured our plan was feasible given our team’s busy schedules. 

In addition to our internal team meetings, we also held weekly meetings with our Sponsor Representative. This was to ensure that the progress we were making was exactly what the sponsor was looking for. As well, we were able to make adjustments to our design based on our Sponsor’s feedback.