Mountaineer United Soccer Club (MUSC) came to us with a problem. Not a cloud (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), big data, Oracle, or enterprise application problem; a different kind of problem. The map they had showing off their various soccer fields were very rudimentary with some not-to-scale representations of the play spaces. Most of all, it lacked visual appeal that people desire when it comes to maps, so they asked us if we had any ideas.
We did a bit of research and took on the challenge. We had some good design ideas for the map. And then as we combined our graphics design expertise with our technology expertise, we envisioned this as a good use case for Procper. Procper is a tool we developed years ago that takes any complex diagram to “the next level”. Procper was designed with business processes modeling in mind, with the ability to centralize, visualize, and analyze process diagrams. It wasn’t long though before we leveraged Procper to do so much more. With Procper, metadata can be attached to certain regions of any kind of image. That metadata becomes searchable and it serves as a beautifully presented wealth of handy information for any user.
Now, back to the MUSC map. This facility has a half a dozen fields, all different sizes and lots of teams (over 1,500 youth participants!), all different age groups. These teams practice on different fields at different times; it could be a little confusing. As a Procper map, the dates and times of practices and games are included in the metadata. Each field was its own region and got its own bits of information. Now when someone wants to know when a team practices, instead of searching through charts and piles of papers to find where they left that schedule, its just a quick search away! It also improves the visit for teams travelling in. They might not be familiar with the facility, but with the new Procper map, it’s incredibly easy for them to find where they need to be and when they need to be there!
This simple example can really show some of the powerful capability that Procper provides. It makes for a better user experience — be it maps for a soccer field, diagrams for a complicated machine, or multi-level business process maps — Procper puts important information users need right at their fingertips.