Product Overview
SportZone is a course project directed by Jacek Gwizdka, an associate professor at UT ischool. As a student UX designer, I worked with a team of 3 on designing a mobile App people can use to connect with others who have the same sport hobby and hold or join a sport event in their interest.
Contributed to the whole design process
Responsible for the ideation process and design of the mobile application.
August - December 2022, 16 weeks
Timeline
My Role
Team
4 Product Designers
Problem Statement
Traditionally, most individuals often play sports with someone they know in person or try to discover people who share their interests. It can be challenging for those who are new to a city looking for people to play sports and for sports-lovers to find people with the same level.
Solution
SportZone provides a convenient way to connect with players who share similar sports interests or hobbies to play sports together at their desired time and location.
How to Measure Our Success?
Deciding on the right metrics
Before we began our design process, we first settled on metircs that would define the success of our product. We chose to apply both behavioral and attituidinal data to analyze the success.
Design Process
01
User Research 📝
Conducting interviews with prospective users
Finding user’s pain points and solutions
02
03
04
Ideation 🧠
Defining user flow
Creating sketches from scratch
Protoytping 🎨
Creating low-fi to high-fi prototypes
Iteration 🔍
Conducting user testing and iterating the prototypes
Key Insights from User Research
Research Purpose
From looking for the right sport events to after-event activity, what problems users will be encountered in the process?
Research Process
We interviewed with 6 participants looking into what steps they usually take from before-an-event, during-an-event to after-an-event.
Then, we build a user journey map to see the pain points users have in every step and what opportunities we have for our product.
Implement our insights: design features
Iterations from Ideation to High-fidelity Prototype
Ideation to Mid-fi
During this stage, the iterations were mainly focused on features determination and product positioning.
Feature Iterations
Share events to third-party social apps
At first, based on the user need that people want to make further connections after sports events, we came up the feature that users can chat with each other and add friends in this app.
A problem came up: why not users use popular chat apps to make further connection?
We rethought the role of our app: should our app be a social app and would users be willing to use our app for socializing instead of existing popular apps like IG and wechat?
As a result, we removed the message and friend lists feature. Instead, we added the feature that sharing events to third party social apps in the event page.
In addition to the reason mentioned above, an important user need is that People are more willing to meet with strangers in the company of familiar ones.
Information Architecture Itrations
Mid-hi to Hi-fi
During this stage, the iterations were mainly focused on information architecture reorgnization because we found that current version made it hard for users to focus on the key information after we add colors and images to the prototypes. For this purpose, we recapped the user needs in the user research stage.
Event Detail Page
At first, we layout the information people would look into in a non-hierarchy way and we wanted to use big icon to attract people’s attention as well as add the interest.
However, when we finished the hi-fi prototype, problems came up. The colors in the interface are too cluttered, which makes it hard to distinguish the important information. Also, People still ranked the importance of this information. For example, people are more concerned with the host’s reputation than who would participate in the event.
Finally, we camp up with our final version of prototype which prioritize the information people are more concerned with.
Home Page
We made several changes to the home page.
Navigation Bar
At the conceptialization stage, our initial vision is that our app has social function, so notification would play an important role in the app. With narrowing the scope of our app, we then remove notification from navigation bar and put it in the right upper corner.
Ongoing Events
At first, we considered users can see thier ongoing event right after their entry to the app. However, there woule be problems related to that design. This can lead to ambiguity because there are two kinds of ongoing event: join or host and there shouldn’t be event people host in home page(also known as join page).
Also, the primary purpose of home page is to present events people can choose. Other information may distract the main function from users.
Event Information Reorganization
We prioritized the information based on users’ ranking of the information.
