The objective of the Innowise group was to update the back-end for the existing application intended for organization of grassroots sports activities, allowing young athletes, their parents and coaches have the up-to date information on individual progress at the palm of the hand.
The problem of a current solution was a lack of global coverage – the individual users had limited opportunities to find each other in the system. Besides, individual registration of the athletes (Player users) was unavailable for the u18 users, which created a great deal of inconvenience for the individuals, whose parents were not too enthusiastic about sporting activities of their offsprings.
The Client wanted to make the app not only a system which would overview local club activities but a more global system, which also implied the possibility for individual registration of any person, while providing appropriate measures to protect underage players identities.
As every sports activity in the system was attached to a certain Sports Group, we introduced a global or universal group, which every user of the system is member. While the existing application search engine allowed to search only contacts in the sports groups the user pertains to, addition of the global group made it possible to now find any user who signed up for the system, allowing newcomers to integrate quicker to the application environment and find contacts to engage in sports activities.
To speed up the search and to reduce the number of server requests the search engine only returns the list of findings only after the third symbol is entered to the search field. We also opted for leaving the existing logic in place, which is less consuming in terms of resources and is familiar for the current users.
The existing functionality only allowed the players to register if they are over 18 years old. If the player is younger it should be under control of a corresponding parent account. This Parent account could create child accounts which could then be accessible both per se and through the Parent account with the same functionality available to the player.
The idea was to implement independent player registration for every age category. For legal reasons it was decided that only players who reach 13 would have the possibility to register as any other user in the systems, while minors should have a certain protection. This was implemented through Parent consent functionality.
We also provided the possibility for Parents to register at any time and establish parental control over the player's account. This takeover would, however, require agreement from the player in question. This gives the players the possibility to retain their "independence", while the Parents who would appreciate the benefits of the application long after their children are there. In case the Parent establishes parental control it effectively serves as a Parental consent (as the Parent can now monitor all the activity of the player).
The application has been tested and submitted for publication. The Web App provides for the most of main functionality of the iOS App.