Understanding Personal Informatics Use in a Professional Football Club: A Rapid Ethnography

user research: contextual research, interviews, observations

Distinction, full text available on UCLIC website

As part of my MSc in Human-Computer Interactions with Ergonomics at UCL, I completed a dissertation project that focussed on the various ways all key stakeholders within the highest-ranked professional football club in Bulgaria, PFC Ludogorets Razgrad, use technology to prepare and continuously be at the top of their game.

This was a user research project focusing on the use of personal informatics - the data gathered about oneself, as well as the idea of workplace tracking - the sharing of personal informatics data within the workplace. The unique lens with which the study was conducted was looking at professional sport where the boundaries of what data about oneself is considered personal and what public are extremely blurred. This brings unique challenges both for the players but also all other staff concerned with their physical and emotional well-being.

The main research method I used in this project was rapid ethnography including formal and informal interviews as well as participant and non-participant observations. Each of these techniques allowed me to uncover unique angles and hidden data.

I chose to perform a rapid ethnographic study as the research time-frame I had was very short - just seven days to discover as much as possible in a context I was not familiar (or terribly comfortable with). This was possible because ethnography allows the researcher to dip into a new culture and collect many varying artefacts, attaching meaning to them as they are collected, creating a description of the culture and context. Thus I was able to create a rich, detailed data set including notes and sketches of the flows of information and the role of the various stakeholders within the team, in addition to the first-hand scripted and informal interviews with both some of the players and the team management and well-being professionals.

All the data I collected was analysed using grounded theory - systematically discovering and improving upon the theories emerging from the data as it was collected.

Three main themes emerged - using data in and ex-situ and the self-esteem of the players.

Using data in-situ refers to the various practices around the personal informatics data while it was being collected during the training periods.

Data ex-situ describes the ways the vast amounts of information and analytics about each player and the team as a whole was used outside the context of the collection - when preparing for new opponents. This point also raised the question of the importance of context: everyone I spoke to in the team highlighted how important knowing the context of how data was collected was to the way it is analysed. However, in many cases, when the best available information was not collected in the appropriate context, they still used it, making best judgements based on previous experience and expertise.

The last but definitely not least important theme, that of the self-esteem of the players crystallises the specific actions and huge amounts of consideration that go into ensuring the players are kept in optimal psychological condition at all times.

The conclusions that I drew from this research were as follows:

In particular contexts, self-reflection isn't enough - it morphs into collaborative data-work, where multiple stakeholders take on the burden of analysing and interpreting in order to provide the best possible outcomes for the individual. With the increasing use of personal informatics and tracking devices within the larger public this opens up the question of how can the companies producing such devices support the data-work and reflection in an automised way.

The context within which the data was collected is extremely important, however we can work without it too. None of the information was ever treated objectively, there is always bias coming from the different understanding of each user. This notion of subjectivity and limitations of the data collected have numerous implications for the future design of personal informatics systems.

In addition, personal informatics should be used to motivate - even within a workspace of professional football players the data collected was analysed and presented in a way to motivate and inspire them, sometimes even hiding certain bits of information in order to keep those levels of motivation. This again has implications for consumer-based technologies in a sense that if "normal" users are also motivated through the interpretation of their data the level of abandonment of personal informatics would probably be lower and the users will be healthier and happier.