Project Repository
Share
Explore
Project Repository
Branden's Project Repository

icon picker
Safe Combat Sports for Children - Quick Case Study

In this exercise, I am a Product Manager creating products for elementary schoolers. This exercise is meant to be a free-thinking creative exercise rather than an in-depth research piece, so I will limit myself to just an hour to complete this exercise from start to finish. For full transparency, timing starts immediately after the “Prompt” section and will end before the “Retrospective” section. Additionally, no outside research will be done for this exercise so any factual information will have to be assumed.

Prompt

Design something to make an activity safe for elementary school children.

Clarifying Questions

Q: Is there any particular activity that I should be targeting my efforts towards?
A: Nope, you’re free to pick any activity that you’d like to make safer.
Q: Does it matter if the product we’re creating is physical or digital?
A: It can be either physical or digital as long as you’re making the activity safer.

Identifying User Segments

Of course the most obvious user segment would be the children that will be primarily using the product, but it’s also important to consider others who may be helping children use the product as well. These other users include:
Parents - For any digital products that children use, parents often times have to approve and teach the children how to use those apps. If the product is physical, the same process has to be done and there’s another layer of coordination that parents have to work around to teach children how to use. For example, any toy that parents buy for their children often needs to be demonstrated before the kids
Teachers - In many ways teachers act as surrogate parents when children are sent to school. On top of their duties of keeping the children safe and cared for, they have to instill knowledge for children to grow and establish a set of life skills. Many products are created to help teachers with this process of teaching children, and that makes teachers another consideration of users who will interact with the product.
Other children - Children that are directly using the product are the main target audience, but whenever children are participating in a communal activity they will be interacting with other children. This makes it an important consideration that the safety product doesn’t additionally pose a danger for other children. For example, children that have steel-toed shoes may be safe from hurting their toes if they accidentally kick a basketball pole but if they accidentally kick another child the damage could be worse.

Activity and Pain Points

Since there are so many different kinds of activities that children can participate, we’ll have to laser in on a given activity. The first thing that came to my mind was martial arts and combat sports for children since that was an activity that I did fairly early on in my own life. I started thinking of some things that made me feel unsafe when I was a child doing martial arts:
Easy to injure self due to poor physical coordination
Sparring without knowing how hard to throw punches/kicks
Poor spatial awareness between students

Solution Ideas

Form silhouette smart mirror - Instructors could program or record motions (either of themselves, assistant instructors, or other students) that can be followed along with via a silhouette playback. This can teach students what proper form would look like, thus preventing injury from improper form.
Force sensing punching bag - This would give visual feedback for exactly how hard the student is hitting the punching bag. Instructors could program the punching bag to highlight particular force ranges that are acceptable for sparring with other students and have them train to only hit within those ranges until they are consistent enough. Punching bags are also the traditional way that people in training get a feel for the ranges of their limbs so adding a visible metric to force so that can be taught as well can help make sparring sessions safer.
Smart sensors for students - I imagine this to be a physical wristband(s) that students can wear during their courses. It can provide haptic feedback for students to make sure that they aren’t getting too close to each other and unwittingly endangering themselves by being in swinging range. This would need to be worn by the full class of students, so something to take into consideration when selling these is selling them in bulk.
Of these solutions, the most viable would be the Force sensing punching bag. The form silhouette smart mirror has limited usefulness and is very expensive to create. Smart sensors have a lot of extraneous variables that need to be taken into account when using them such as the wingspan of students and whether or not multiple profiles could be created and stored on a sensor band. Additionally they will need to be designed to be sweat and waterproof which will further complicate the manufacturing process.

The Punching Bag

Other than the punching bag itself, there are a few other important factors to consider when it comes to the design of the punching bag. The bag will need a display to show exactly how much force is being applied when students hit the bag. Given that this punching bag has digital elements, it will also need a power source to power the display showing the force. These two elements point to the most useable design being a stationary upright punching bag similar to many punching bags that have a hollow base so it can be anchored down by the weight of water. Stationary punching bags don’t have to deal with rotation which is a nightmare for any product that needs to be plugged in.
The base and inside of the punching area can be used to store any electronics for the display. As for the display there are some options on how and where to place it. One option is to simply have the display directly on top of the punching bag. The downside of this design is that the display is going to wobble and be difficult to read as someone is using the punching bag. Alternatively, the display can be connected externally and mountable either on a wall or on a display stand which eliminates the difficulty of readability during use.
The display itself will probably need to be programmable probably via an app to highlight what are acceptable ranges. Numbers could be displayed in green when the user hits the punching bag with force that falls within the acceptable range, while going above or below the range would display the numbers in red. Having a display that’s controllable via an app also opens up opportunity for additional options on what might be good to display on the screen. One feature that might be helpful is adding a timer feature so that people can have set workout sessions with the bag. During this workout time, the bag can record the average force of the hits and after the timer runs up it can display a percentage to the user of how many of their hits landed within the acceptable range that was pre-programmed. Having this somewhat gamified experience to the training experience will hopefully act as a teaching method to make actual sparring sessions with other humans safer.
It’s also important to consider the normal usage of a punching bag, since most users probably don’t want to own both a normal punching bag as well as a second one that trains for safety alone. The app should also reflect that it has been designed with normal use in mind as well. Personalizing the individual’s use with target force range suggestions for intensity training instead of safety training would be one example of broadening the use of the punching bag. With enough data the sensors might even be able to intelligently let users know that they may be striking with the wrong area of their limbs and to correct themselves. Sizing of the product needs to be taken into account as well since the main audience for the punching bag is children, but adults may also want to use it as well.

KPIs

Child combat sports injury rates - This would be the most direct metric to measure whether or not the safety measures that the product is trying to instill are keeping children safe. This may be tough to measure because we would need to rely on user reports about children’s safety and each user may have a different way of defining what constitutes an injury.
Usage time - Of course since the product is for a sport, users will need to consistently use the product and train with it in order to get the full benefit of the product.
Completed workout sessions - These can further be subdivided based on the kind of workout and each will tell us something different about the usage of the punching bag.
Safety workouts - If this number is high then the purpose of the bag is being fulfilled, and this should hopefully be an indicator that the injury rates are lowered.
Intensity workouts - High numbers of intensity workouts may show that students are training for competition and may be something worth looking at around the time that large martial arts tournaments are announced.
Programmed Force Ranges - Data gathered for the programmed force ranges may be something worth monitoring since it is easy to push through changes for any suggested force ranges for a particular kind of workout. This may also be dynamic based on user data, since different weight classes may change the appropriate force range to practice with.

Retrospective

This exercise was a bit different than the previous since it was a much more abstract prompt to create something that doesn’t exist whatsoever. I’m fairly satisfied with how I did with this exercise and I gained perspective about this kind of exercise overall. I’m not sure if this is a personal limitation or if this is naturally the inspiration that is drawn upon during these whiteboarding exercises, but I do tend to rely on my own past experiences to guide my creative ideas. Of course, from there I rely on the skillset that I have to understand and dissect user groups and their pain points. I’m not sure if this is necessarily a weakness or if it can be a strength to be able to gather insights from my own experience and relate it to different user needs.
As for this exercise, I was fairly happy with the solution that I came up with and the few things that I had thought about in terms of execution of the product. I did get a little stuck trying to come up with more creative ways to train safety using a punching bag, but I was running into a barrier since I didn’t want to focus too much on the app and essentially make that a separate product. I had thought about integrating a “teaching” system on the app that would show users new moves to try on the punching bag and having force ranges built for those moves. My problem with that was it would simply change from the product of the punching bag to designing an instructional app. The biggest reason why I avoided creating an instructional app to begin with was because I wanted to be able to afford flexibility of how users want to interact. There are so many different styles of martial arts, as well as different training methods and an instructional app or product simply wouldn’t be as ubiquitous or reach as wide of an audience. I wanted to create something that people could interact with on their own terms with their own style of fighting.
I do think that I detracted a bit from the original prompt as well, since I knew that punching bags weren’t purely for the purpose of safety so I wanted to tout the additional benefits and uses of punching bags as a way to show that the audience reach would be pretty wide. I think I did a fairly decent job at that but I do fear that it detracted from the core idea of the project a bit.
If I had to redo this exercise from the point where I decided on children’s combat sports, I think I would spend a bit more time and effort in coming up with other ways to train safety via the punching bag. Since this is a time limited exercise, I was feeling the pressure to simply write as much as I could and not dwell on any particular segment too much because it’s important to understand how to measure the success of the product outside of simply sales and marketing buzz. I might also think to use Porter’s 5 Forces next time around as well, but that was something that I avoided mostly due to time constraints in this instance. Given a larger amount of time allowing for a more well-researched project I think that using the 5 Forces framework would help to identify additional opportunities for potential products.
As always, I greatly appreciate any time taken to read these exercises. I’m always happy to have conversations about Product so feel free to connect with me and message on LinkedIn!

Gallery
Share
 
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.