Building an interactive visualization tool for athletes’ performance data

Abstract: The world of competitive sports is becoming more and more interested in data analysis. Using sensors to track actions and trajectories produces large datasets that could be hard to draw conclusions from at face value. Visualizations can be used to make the process of data analysis easier and possibly allow for more advanced insights. The question is how visualizations should be implemented and what the possibilities are in doing so. Described in this paper is a project for designing an interactive visualization tool for olympic kayaking. Available research and theories of information visualization was combined with related research regarding visual data analysis for sports, and applied to the project. The process followed a problem-driven approach during a period of continuous feedback with domain experts. Qualitative data was collected throughout feedback sessions in an iterative process of developing a concept for a web-based tool. The results indicate that visualizations indeed do support and enable intuitive insight generation. In summary, the concept could improve data analysis, both making it more sophisticated and more accessible. Furthermore, it could improve collaborations between different user roles. However, needing to tailor the concept to a specific sport may affect the transferability to other sports, and the multidimensionality of the dataset produced a number of challenges to consider in future work. A number of improvements were suggested for the concept, and it was deemed promising for future research, development and implementation, which should be done in collaboration with domain experts.