The Sport Wales ‘Performance Project Portal’ aims to be a central collaboration tool for sport-related initiatives, but technical and usability barriers have limited its effectiveness. We ran a discovery to identify how to ensure its future success.
Sport Wales is the national organisation responsible for developing and promoting sport and physical activity in Wales. They’ve committed to developing the most science-informed sporting system in the world, to enable athletes in Wales to thrive and “win well”. To support this ambition, they provide a range of funding and support for Welsh athletes, from elite to grassroots level. Projects can range from addressing a unique nutritional challenge across all levels of a particular sport, or supporting the rehabilitation of an elite athlete.
The ‘Performance Project Portal’ was launched to improve project management across the lifecycle of these sport-related initiatives. From the submission of applications for support, through to project planning, delivery and end-of-project review. This would ensure that projects and their insights could be organised, tracked and shared. Providing better transparency and knowledge sharing across the organisation, and across sporting national bodies in Wales.
However, initial feedback indicated growing frustration among users, with many struggling to find project information and opting for offline methods for tracking project progress. With declining engagement, the portal’s role in delivering high-quality, science-led support to athletes was at risk.
We were engaged to investigate the underlying usability issues of the system through user research. We needed to understand user needs and pain points across Sport Wales employees, practitioners, sport leads and Welsh Institute of Performance Science (WIPS) staff. As well as identify any usability challenges impacting engagement and confidence in the portal.
Once we had an understanding of how well the service was performing, and what the underlying issues were, we could then develop a set of recommendations for how to improve the service and help drive user adoption.
We applied our rigorous, user-centred research methodology, aligning with the Digital Service Standard for Wales and GOV.UK service standard. This ensured recommendations were based on genuine user needs and operational realities, rather than assumptions and guesswork. To achieve this, we conducted:
In-depth workshops with key stakeholders and sports practitioners helped us understand the Performance Project, clarify goals, identify challenges and establish our approach to collaboration with users and stakeholders.
The workshops allowed us to map out the end-to-end service blueprint and core user journeys. From how new project ideas were identified and evaluated, through to how the eventual benefits and outcomes could be shared across the sporting community. By detailing key online and offline activities, as well as the stakeholders, users and business requirements, we were able to illuminate critical interdependencies and pain points. Such as technical limitations of the service resulting in users falling back to old offline methods for managing their projects.
We validated this initial understanding of the service through in-depth interviews with 13 users from 4 core user groups:
These semi-structured interviews validated and identified specific needs, frustrations and ways of working, forming a rich foundation for understanding user pain points with the existing service. To broaden data collection and further validate our findings, we deployed a user survey across the sporting community.
Collaborative workshops, both remote and in-person at Sport Wales’s head office, brought together key stakeholders to sense-check our insights, brainstorm solutions and prioritise recommendations based on impact and feasibility. This enabled continual knowledge sharing and buy-in, while ensuring alignment between our findings and stakeholder priorities.
We also looked at other best-in-class digital services, investigating exemplar systems with features like frictionless logins, intuitive dashboards and simple-yet-effective notification systems. Aiming to identify which of these features could help the Performance Project Portal be a best-in-class digital experience.
Our research and analysis clearly highlighted the significant value in the service. It provides a transparent, single source of information for those viewing, managing and sharing project information. It reduces duplication of effort and improves knowledge sharing across organisations and sports. However, we identified key user needs weren’t being satisfied, including the need for:
Alongside this, “clunky” navigation, inconsistent terminology, slow loading times and work not being saved correctly, had all eroded trust in the system and increased users' frustrations.
In total, we identified 70 usability issues (prioritised by likelihood and impact) and 12 key pain points for users of the service. We addressed all these with a set of 20 actionable recommendations. They covered everything from quick-wins, such as improving in-system guidance and restructuring the home page, to higher-effort, higher-reward approaches, such as overhauling the cumbersome login workflow and addressing the underlying stability issues of the service.
“Re-designing the wheel with a bespoke solution, when it’s not strictly necessary, is never something we’d recommend to a client.”
The size and scale of the technical issues users were reporting were unexpected and concerning. Without fixing the underlying technical issues, many of the core issues would remain. We therefore suggested Sport Wales should conduct a short, technical exploration into the underlying service infrastructure to understand the:
Depending on the findings from these recommendations, we shared 3 potential routes forward to achieve their goals spanning:
Our final recommendation was not to develop a bespoke solution, should the existing solution not be salvageable. While the context of Sport Wales is unique, the significant majority of service features, workflows and tooling are common across a range of existing solutions. Re-designing the wheel with a bespoke solution, when it’s not strictly necessary, is never something we’d recommend to a client.
We complemented our recommendations with a detailed report, outlining the methodology, as well as all insights and evidence that supported this conclusion. Alongside supporting artefacts to help shape, support and maintain the team’s understanding and approach of the service development throughout future delivery phases.
“If we went through the same process again we would choose Marvell to do it. My boss was really happy and he's hard to please!” Dan Grimstead, Clinical and Delivery Lead, Sport Wales
Sport Wales have since begun implementing our recommendations, initiating their internal technical exploration. They’re seeking insight into the feasibility of stabilising the core infrastructure to develop our recommended improvements. Once this has been concluded, they will adopt their chosen delivery option.
Whether you’re ready to start your project now or you just want to talk things through, we’d love to hear from you.
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